CHDK

For those of you with a Canon point and shoot camera and who love to take pictures of constellations and such, there’s a really cool firmware hack called CHDK. This particular (non permanent) adjustment to your Canon camera will let it shoot in raw and – more importantly – use much longer exposure times, up to something like 30 minutes! Yes that’s true, 30 minutes!! All you need to do is download the right CHDK for your camera and copy it to a bootable SD card. Then make sure the card is locked (don’t worry, you can still take pictures with it with the lock enabled) and it will boot up with CHDK options. My little Canon Powershot SX 200 IS now has the above menu (and a lot more). Tons of fun, but you gotta be somewhat adventurous to get it all working.