My First Star trail

wornish

Senior Member
Had a clear night last night so tried my first startrail.This is 10 x 30 sec shots taken at 1 min intervals.
Then stacked using some open source software called StarStax I am quite pleased.


Need another clear night to have a longer go.


The Pole Star is almost in the centre.


First Startrail.jpg

Larger version here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22888258@N06/9893395294/
 

wornish

Senior Member
It was my first go so just wanted to see the effect. The StarStax software has a "fill the gaps" mode which works amazingly well.
Its nearly always cloudy here in Cheshire but next chance I get I am going for a longer run of about an hour when the moon is not visible and hopefully no jet trails from planes .
The D800 is amazing at capturing the details in the trees even though it was a dark night with some moonlight it looks light daylight when you load in the raw data, need to try a bit more PP.
 

Scott Murray

Senior Member
It was my first go so just wanted to see the effect. The StarStax software has a "fill the gaps" mode which works amazingly well.
Its nearly always cloudy here in Cheshire but next chance I get I am going for a longer run of about an hour when the moon is not visible and hopefully no jet trails from planes .
The D800 is amazing at capturing the details in the trees even though it was a dark night with some moonlight it looks light daylight when you load in the raw data, need to try a bit more PP.

Well its a great first effort :) looking forward to your future ones.
 

wornish

Senior Member
Thanks.

The settings I used were ISO 400, 22mm, f/2.8 then used timer to take 20 x 25sec exposures at 30 sec intervals i.e total time 10 minutes.
The clever thing about StarStax is that you first take a shot with the lens cap on which it uses as dark shot to get the noise and subtract it from the other shots.
So no extra noise reduction was required. The weather here is the main challenge.
 
Last edited:

wornish

Senior Member
Star trail

Strange happenings
Warp Drive.jpg


Seven shots each taken at shorter focal length by zooming out stacked with free StarStacker app.
 
Top