50 Minute Exposure with a D200???

Digital night photographers have a fascination with taking longer and longer exposures at night. Part of the fascination is due to the fact that if your exposure becomes long enough, the sensor begins introducing noise to the detriment of the image. Prior to a few days ago, I was under the impression that the latest crop of DSLR's were topping out around 20 minutes, which is far cry from my five-year old Canon D60's limit of four minutes.

(photo: Laura Elskan)

Then I came across Flickr user happylaura's image below. As any night photographer will immediately notice from the length of the startrails, this exposure was significantly longer than twenty minutes. Could it have been created by stacking multiple shorter exposures?

Happylaura (her real name is Laura Elskan) took the above image with the relatively new Nikon D200. It was a single exposure, using only in-camera noise reduction. In other words, no stacking of multiple images, and no post-processing noise reduction such as NoiseNinja. The temperature? It was a brisk 30-deg F. Not unreasonably cold for any serious night photograper.

She also told me that she took another image at 109 minutes! It looks like Canon now has some serious competition in the NPy world, now.

If any other night photographers have any experience with long exposures with the D200, please post them to the comment section.