Attempt at Star trails...

Last Friday was another beautiful clear day. I decided to head out in the evening to try and get a few more night sky images. I headed over to an area I know of which has some really nice looking mature trees and heaps of huge boulders, in an effort to get some really interesting foregrounds in my images.

Because I have been doing a bit of night sky photography lately I wanted to try something I haven't attempted before, Star trails! In a nut shell taking star trails involves leaving the shutter of the camera open while the stars move by overhead. This results in the stars appearing to leave circular trails behind them in the image as they move across the sky.

The conditions started out really great for night sky photography with great visibility but extremely cold temperatures. I started off with some 10 minute exposures so that I could see the trailing of the stars in my images and get an idea of exposure settings without having to wait for ages between shots. After taking 2 or 3 of these images making adjustments to settings and composition, I decided to go for a long 30 minute shot!

Unfortunately about half way through my shot it decided to get really foggy. We live next to a lake and in the winter it gets really thick and foggy most of the time. I decided to keep the exposure going and see what it came out like. Fortunately it didn't stay foggy for too long, the breeze started to pick up and blew most of the fog away from my location and revealed the sky again for the last 10 minutes or so. The resulting image has a slightly indistinct foreground but the stars are still really clear. Completely an accident but really cool nonetheless!

First decent Star trail image. (30min Exp at F5.6 ISO 800)

I took some normal night sky shots just before packing up at around 10pm just to see what they came out like with the darker skies at that time (At the moment the moon is up mostly during the day and is in the first quarter phase so it was really dark).

In future I want to do more experimenting with star trails. I think I need to use a higher F-stop value, and lower ISO speed, but even longer exposure times. 30 minutes still did not give very long trails but the settings I used resulted in a very bright image. Which I had to adjust in camera raw (this is the reason I shoot in raw and then adjust later on the computer). I also want to have a crack at creating a time lapse sequence of the milky way moving across the sky. Lots to look forward too!