Sure - i'll add in the captions for the pictures.

As far as the star trails picture, because that was so much move involved than the other shots, it was on Thanksgiving night, 2012. I drove up as far north of State College as I could after dinner that night. I got almost to Renovo, PA, and found a pull off on the side of the road.

There was a cliff/mountain behind me that is exactly opposite of the direction the camera is pointing. The moon was also rising behind me, which provide the foreground lighting on the mountain. You can see this changed over the three hours I shot, as there is a faded shadow pattern in the ridge on the mountain.

For this shot I believe I had 200-300 20/30 second exposures. It was shot on a D7000 with a 10-24mm DX lens (Nikkor). I edited in raw, then I stacked the photos in "Lightrails.de", a freeware program. I gave the final TIFF a few more slight edits and exported to JPEG.

I spent the night just waiting in my car listening to music!

Yes, I hear you, HOWEVER I did NOT have to plug in the cable to the grip to use the camera.... the grip slides into the battery compartment to make the power connection, two batteries in the grip... the cable connection is to allow you to use the grip shutter button... I found that it was just as easy to NOT connect the cable and continue to use the in camera shutter button. The grip does not transmit anything special over the remote shutter connection, just the shutter release from the grip. At least on the Mieke grips for the D3000 & D5100.

Hence, the remote connection on the camera was still open for use....

I had a grip on a D3000 and a D5100, isn't the remote cable connection only used for the shutter button on the grip? If the reason is to add additional batteries the grip could still be used sans the cable connection, and just continue to use the normal shutter button on the camera?

I had two Mieke Grips - cheap for sure, but they did do what they are supposed to do.

I have a Mieke grip on my D7100 now, connections are done thru the bottom of the camera, but if I had it to do over I would buy a Nikon grip, although the Mieke does work fine.