Tonight, I decided to test out my until-now unused Manfrotto Befree tripod, along with my new camera, to do some night photography.  I hoped to be able to experiment with some basic exposure/ISO settings, as I haven't done much photography in anything other than the auto mode. While the weather was pleasant, with the temperature at 12 ° C, the skies were unfortunately not clear, with a rather heavy cloud cover.  The moon however was bright enough, but at almost 12 '0 clock position, so it proved to be a lot of work with the tripod, for a first timer.  While setting up the tripod and aiming the camera, I discovered for the first time, how inconvenient not having a flip-out EVF can be, as I found myself having to adjust the tripod height and my own posture, to be able to view the EVF.  After some initial hiccups, I managed to get the angle right, and get a couple of shots of the moon.Exposure: 1/1000s, ISO 160, f/6.5

At this point, a couple of stars peeked out from behind the clouds.  Zeroing in onto the stars with the SP-100's dot-sight was child's play, but fine tuning the tripod was a harder task. I found that when I aimed the camera, I was applying some pressure on it and when I locked the tripod into position and took my hands off the camera, the removal of pressure caused a small shift in the camera's angle, and since I was using over 50x zoom, this tiny shift was enough to spoil the centering/framing.  It was hard to factor for the expected shift and get the fix on the tripod accordingly.  The clouds too were drifting in and out, meaning I had to shoot as quickly as I could. I spotted Rigel, zoomed in and took this shot.  I now realize that I set the ISO too high.

Exposure: 1s, ISO 3200, f/6.5</span>

I was then able to spot another very bright star.  After some strugging with Google Skymaps, on my mobile phone which doesn't have a magnetometer, I realized that it was Sirius, aka the Dog Star.  It sure was bright!

Exposure: 1/3s, ISO 1250, f/6.5

The temperature began to dip a bit and I wasn't really dressed warm, so I ended the session, happy to have got a couple of pictures and some first hand experience of using a camera in manual mode, coupled with a tripod! :)  I sure hope for clearer night skies, and soon, to be able to try and experiment some more. </lj-cut>