I have a new tripod for Christmas, and took it out to Monterey to give it a shot.  The tripod worked great, but after I got home, I realized that I had a technical issue I hadn’t considered.  The technical problem was that no matter how still the water is, the boats still move a little bit. The boat movement becomes pretty pronounced when the exposure is long.  Live and learn.

It turns out, though, that my camera can pick up the stars, even with all the light, if processed correctly.  I don’t know much about processing right now, so I don’t yet know how to bring out the stars without blowing out other parts of the picture.  Here are my efforts:

Darker, with fewer stars

More stars, but kind of blown out otherwise