Star Trails

Film wise, you have an advantage, even at low iso's you end up with a lot of long exposure noise with digital.

I worry about damaging my camera's sensor with super long exposures.

Alright, so here's my results.



First thing first:

The Stats
120 exposures at 60 seconds each with a 3 second delay between each shot

The Composition
Moon to the west, houses back yard faces south. South didn't contain enough start because of the moon. My only option was east. My only compositional options were my kids swing set or my neighbors garage.. I chose the swing set. That was my only thought, so please don't judge me on that :-p Looking forward to better centerpieces.

The Processing
I used this software, ( markus-enzweiler.de/StarStaX/StarStaX.html#download ) it creates a really low res output but it is good enough for web viewing. I'll try others out as I get a chance. Otherwise it was super quick.

What I found
I think 60 seconds is too long for my camera. I had a lot of dead/hot pixels (which I shopped out of my final image) (Original)
The moon will either need to not be there or be less than half moon. Stars started to appear in the shot as the night progressed (I started at 9pm and went to 11pm). The short trails with the long trails looked funny.

Tips to note:
Turn off image review/lcd when taking shots, just wasting battery life.
Determine your cameras threshold for long exposure and hot pixels before taking a serious shot
Three (3) seconds in between shots is as long as I'd go. Even with 3 seconds, you can ever so slightly see a gap in the trails. At least with how this was processed.


I think that's all I have for now.

I did not cover the viewfinder. Hadn't even thought of that! Good tip.

I need to add one more thing to my "Tips to Note" which I will edit above also.

When using the "multiple shot" method, 3 second delay between shots is about as long as I'd go. Probably going going to do 2 seconds. I didn't think there would be much gap with only 3 seconds, but you can kinda see it.

So starting NEXT week (December 10th - 16th) we will have 16% or less moonlight. Obviously we need to keep weather in consideration but who's up for getting together at a location we can agree on, on a day where the sky is clear and take an attempt at some star trails?

So I saw the sky was clear and dark last night so I setup the camera and took another series of shots. First, here's the image:



Settings: 300 images @30 second, f/4, ISO200, 14mm
(one second delay between shots)

Long Exposure Noise: So because of the long exposure noise I had in the first attempt with 1 min exposures, I dropped it down to 30 seconds because in all my time taking 30 second shots, not once have I noticed any noise. Results, perfect. No noise, so thats the money time there. I did have to crank my ISO to 200 though but that wasn't too much of a biggie. ISO 200 is still relatively noise free.

I shot in RAW this time. The first time I shot in JPG was a mistake, I like to shoot in RAW and always shoot in RAW... well after processing 300 20mb RAW files into JPG's, I'm thinking I might go back to JPGs. Neither time did I do any processing to the images and I think the results were fine, should cut about 20 min off the process time too.

Previous attempt was 3 second delay between shots and I noticed a dashed look, I was going to cut it to two(2) but decided to go with one(1) and I think I like one(1).

That's all I got for this go round!

Daniel, nice photo and nice write up. I'm going to try this again soon too.

I have a HD camcorder I've done time-laps video with in the past. I can set it up to do a few frames once a second. It works great with cloud moments, and the moon. I haven't tried it with stars yet.