Ants, Clouds, Moon and 10 second exposures

I love my Nikon D5000, it is one of the best investments I have made. Last week a friend and I decided to do something about the ant problem in my front yard so we grabbed the waterhose, turned it on full blast and gave the ants a taste of what they might consider extreme hurricane conditions, think Katrina, but with ants. Their response and first responder team was by far a lot faster than FEMA's was as they had relocated about 10 feet north and had rebuild an even bigger and better hill than their previous one. Also, there was another really cool moonrise here in Austin so I got home as fast as I could, grabbed my camera and a stepladder that I used as a tripod, and snapped a few photos.

A few weeks a go I was conversing with my best friend Andrew who is also into photography and recommended that I try shooting some photos using the manual exposure mode. So I set the camera to manual mode and set the shutter for a 10 second exposure. The following are the results of those events. Also the photos seemed to lose A LOT of quality after I uploaded them on to here just click on the picture and you will get the higher quality image.