Star Trails

[Lane Meyer]

I went into Desolation last weekend and spent a few nights by Fontanellis. I've always wanted to try making a nice star trails shot. I tried two things - first, I set up my tripod, built a cairn around it to shield from the 15-20mph winds, and did 17 x 5 minute exposures @ f/4.5 ISO 200, and used my headlamp to paint the last one. There's a gap at the end because I had to change batteries and nudged the tripod. The images were layered in PS CS3 with a combination of "screen" and "lighten" blend mode according to directions I found on Fred Miranda's forums.



Then, when I crawled into my tent, I set up the tripod next to me and fired for ~20 minutes @ f/5.6, ISO 100. Using a Canon 50D, 10-22. I painted the tree with my headlamp for about 0:30.



This second one was predictably noisy, so I post-processed it in Neat Image.
I feel like I have a bit of knowledge about shooting star trails now, at least in terms of knowing how to have a better strategy next time. The wind made it very hard to expect to get a sharp image, but that's life in the mountains. Looking forward to trying again and getting better at it. I think next time I might simultaneously setup my Bronica and shoot with 120 slide film to see the difference.

[Fuzz]

^ Nice. I haven't tried painting the foreground (mainly because I don't have a very interesting foreground where I usually shoot from), but will have to try it next time.

If you're in a place with little light pollution at this time of year, just point the camera straight up and shoot for 30-60 seconds at wide angle. You should get very nice Milky Way images (it spans from approximately north-east to south-west currently).

[SB]

This thread is as cool as the one(on another site) with aurora pictures.

[OverTurn]

this thread is awesome, i'll definitely be contributing in the future when I get a tripod. cmor, that last shot of the campsite is $$$

[Fuzz]

Technically not star trails, but still it is a picture of stars (x-posted from [ame="http://www.tetongravity.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162752"]this thread[/ame])...

M13 Great Globular Cluster in Hercules
A cluster of several hundred thousand stars, located 25,000 light-years from Earth. The cluster is 145 light-years across, with an estimated age of 14 billion years.
10 subs x 5 seconds at ISO1600 (plus 10 darks), stacked using Nebulosity

[Fuzz]

To give some idea of the difference stacking and dark frame subtraction make (click on the images for larger sizes)...

Single 5-second frame, no dark frame:


Single 5-second frame + single dark frame subtraction:


10 subs stacked but no dark frame subtraction:


10 subs + 10 dark frame subtractions (same image as in previous post above):

[supermodel159]

Meteor shower tonight.

[grskier]

First few tries... have a lot of red noise



second



third

[Fuzz]

First few tries... have a lot of red noise

^ The third one is sweet. How long was the exposure (or each exposure)? The bright sky is because of ambient light pollution. The way to reduce that is to take shorter exposures and add them together.

[grskier]

^ The third one is sweet. How long was the exposure (or each exposure)? The bright sky is because of ambient light pollution. The way to reduce that is to take shorter exposures and add them together.

They were all about 15 minutes +/- this was the only one with the lake in the shot, which was reflecting more light than I would have expected considering you couldn't see a moon last night.

I don't have a star stacking software (yet)... I think I'll try that next time I get a chance to shoot star trails.

The first two are with my 70-200 f4L the third is with my 18-55 kit lens.