So I'm totally new to photography, just bought a used a55 in pretty great shape and this is from my first night attempting star photography, lemme know what you think! http://imgur.com/npl76

Welcome aboard! I'd say very impressive, no ghosting from that SLT mirror, and placing the poles and wires as a foreground works well.

Can I suggest you display the image using the forum code provided by your hosting:



You'll then get more response and comment.

David

Hi
I’m always interested in sky views even though I hardly ever take any photos of it myself, but do have a telescope and friends who have telescopes.
I got to wondering what your photo actually depicted (what you were photographing from your location) so I found a planetarium on the web http://www.skyviewcafe.com/skyview.php?ie9pass=true put in the Latitude and Longitude for Williamsport and juggled the direction of view until I had an approximate match. I already suspected that the triangular formation of stars in your photo (upper right) was Taurus anyway, you guys look at things upside down compared to me but Taurus is fairly distinctive.
Not a bad photo actually I tried a couple of times in the past and got way more noise than that. One thing the camera seems to do well is pick up lots more stars than the eye can see, at least that’s how it was for me.
Greg

Ah alright, I'll post the actual lat/long when I get on my own computer since I had GPS tagging turned on to see if you can get a better match at all

Hi
The view is pretty close to what you were looking at I think but the main thing that's not the same is the view angle (amount of sky coverage), I couldn't find the zoom function on the web based planetarium to match your view angle more closely...it needs to be zoomed in a bit.
Greg