Star Trails

Taken in Raw, ISO 800, f/3.5/ 18 mm, for 30 second exposures. 188 pictures with camera in-built intervalometer 1 second delay.
Taken April 18. Camera run time approx. 1.6 hours.

It was a clear night April 18th. So I went outside to look for a good spot to leave the camera, and saw one of our trees, still with spring buds. I set up the camera for a repeated long exposure in front of that tree and left it for a while, checking it only a few times. One of those times our porch light lit up the tree, which affected only two photos. But for a star trail, that affects the rest of the exposure. I put them through a program called Starstax. It has a “gap filling mode” where it fills and “stacks” light consecutively with each photo.  That’s why the tree being lit up affects the rest of the pictures after it.

This video was made by running the stacked pictures through a different program called Time Lapse Creator. It simply displays a picture for a set amount of milliseconds before moving onto another and repeating.

Links: Star StaX

Time Lapse Creator