D7000 cable release advice needed

Hello all,
I have been doing star trails successfully using the built in intravalometer using 30sec exposures with a 32sec interval times x number off shots. While this works for stacking in starstax it is too limited for stacking the shots with satellites moving across the sky. The 2 second gap leave a very big gap due to the speed of the satellites. I have tried a SHOOT external intravalometer which also has a locking cable release to overcome the 2 second gap. On the two occasions that I have tried this using the locking release the camera has stopped taking pictures after 99 files. The buffer remaining indicator has gone to r0 and the camera will no longer take pictures until it is turned off then on again. The buffer can't be filling up on 30sec exposures as there is plenty of time for the buffer to empty between shots. I am using fast Sandisk U1 80Mb/s cards. NEF slot 1 JPEG slot 2. Any help or advice would be appreciated.

I don't know much about this, but it's not a long exposure noise reduction problem is it? It adds to the processing time between shots.

Long exposure noise reduction is turned off, as it takes a dark frame image in similar length to your exposure which would result in 30secs gaps.

Your problem is that the D7000, and many (all?) Nikon cameras, has a Max Release setting for Continuous mode with a value of 1-100 (custom menu item d7). Unfortunately there's no way to turn that off that I know of.

What you need is a shutter release that will act as an intervalometer for you, making individual shutter activations instead of locking the shutter in continuous mode. I have a Vello Shutter Boss and I'm playing with it with my D7000 now. It took me a while to get it set up properly, but it seems that I need to set a 33 second firing interval with a 30 second shutter speed, and it results in a little less than 1 second gap between firings. At 31 and 32 seconds the firing signal was missed as the shutter recycled. Perhaps try something like this. You're still going to get a gap, but it's less than a second.

BackdoorHippie said:

Your problem is that the D7000, and many (all?) Nikon cameras, has a Max Release setting for Continuous mode with a value of 1-100 (custom menu item d7). Unfortunately there's no way to turn that off that I know of.

What you need is a shutter release that will act as an intervalometer for you, making individual shutter activations instead of locking the shutter in continuous mode. I have a Vello Shutter Boss and I'm playing with it with my D7000 now. It took me a while to get it set up properly, but it seems that I need to set a 33 second firing interval with a 30 second shutter speed, and it results in a little less than 1 second gap between firings. At 31 and 32 seconds the firing signal was missed as the shutter recycled. Perhaps try something like this. You're still going to get a gap, but it's less than a second.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the answer Jake and good to see you back. I have successfully used both the internal and my shoot external intervalometers on 30sec exposure and 32 sec interval. I was hoping to get unlimited exposures using the locking mechanism to stack the images when the satellites or ISS pass through the frame and use the whole stack for the star trails. It is quite dark where I live and satellites especially the ISS can be very bright but as they are moving so fast the 2 second gap leaves a large gap between them. I guess i will have to have one body setup for star trails using the intervalometer and another for the satellite passes on the locking mode. If I want clean star trails ie no satellites I have to wait until after about 9.00pm local time as most satellites are in the shadow of the earth after this time. Thanks again for your answer.