Star Trail Experiment

This is my second attempt at creating a star trail photography, I suppose I actually achieved what I wanted which was to have smooth, clean and unbroken trails. This is about 45 minutes of star movement or rather earth rotation. The only gripe I have is that it isn't in focus, getting tiny dots of light that you can bearly see through your viewfinder in focus is probably about the hardest part of the process. Either way this was only an experiment, my aim was to improve on the first attempt (below). In my first attempt the star trails came out slightly wobbly due to my having to press the button manually each time so there was some movement but this time I used my cable release and just locked it off. I set the camera on continuous shooting with a 30 second exposure, 400 ISO and F4 aperture. Then just locked off the cable release and let it be for 45 minutes. In post production I used photoshop to merge all the images together (I'll explain the photoshop process for anyone who would like to try this a bit further down).




Photoshop Process

1. First off make sure all the star trail images are in one folder as this will save you time in the long run.Open your first and second star trail images in photoshop.



2. Now press CTRL+A to select the second image and then CTRL+C to copy it. You can now close your second image window, you will not need it again. Maximise the first image again and press CTRL+V to paste Star Trail 2 as a layer.



3. Click on the newly created Layer 1 then change the Blending Mode from Normal to Lighten. Now if you zoom in on the image you'll notice the star trail has doubled in length.



4. Open the next image in your sequence and repeat CTRL+A, CTRL+C, close window, CTRL+V into your first image and Lighten process. Repeat this until all your images have been copied as layers.



5. The final step is to Flatten all the layers into one image. You do this by going to Layer then Flatten Image. This may take a while but afterwards you have your finished Star Trail which you can touch up as you please.



Alex out.