Star Trails

[whiteflyer]

Yes leave your ISO at 100.

My shot took 53 minutes, on a tripod. To get some detail in the tower I used a torch to paint light over the tower.

Basically I shone a torch over the tower from top to bottom for a couple on minutes during the exposure.

[rdaw]

Great shot, whiteflyer - I really liked your torch work-around, too - not sure that would have crossed my mind.
I tried to take some star trail pics this past weekend - stayed up WAY too late waiting for it to get dark enough. I finally decided, enough of checking every five minutes, I won't check for another hour. I went outside with camera, tripod, remote etc an hour later, only to see the moon rising, blotting out my bright stars. If I'd checked the calendar for moon phases, I would have been in bed two hours earlier and spared watching a totally abysmal movie. Lesson learned...

[henryscat]

I love this technique but I have read several warnings about leaving the shutter open for that amount of time and what damage you can do to the sensor. However I have also read that it is a pile of rubbish.

I borrowed a fully manual film camera in order to try this technique but when there is a 7 month old in the house, sleep is much more precious!

Nice swirls btw!

[rediguana]

Originally Posted by soxboston

For people south of the equator, I'm not sure which star is the southern celestial pole, but you would have to include that one depending on your location.

For the Southerners, you can use the Southern Cross and the Pointers to locate the south celestial pole.

I've done some exposures up to around 5 minutes to attempt to capture the Milky Way, but I've now got to find a way to place the camera on a tracking mount to do long exposures with no trails.

Cheers Gav

[ziriuz84]

Cool shots!! Particularly the b/w one!
This was a test I made some years ago. The gear was my Nikon F2AS Photomic with the 28mm lens opened at f/1.8. The shutter time was something around 10 minutes, i think (i don't remember now), with an 800 ISO as film

In the bottom you can see the Pleyads (the little cluster). The yellow cloud maybe came from some light in the little towns near my location.

[rikkersc]

I took a few star trails the other night while waiting around for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and I think they turned out okay, (looked fine on the LCD, still have to check them on the monitor.)
The meteor shower didn't turn out any great photos though. They were too infrequent in our area to capture any and they appeared in too many random spots in the sky (I was hoping one or two would pass though my star trails.
I am hoping to post a star trail once I get it to the monitor.

[Pernod]

I tried this the other night, found a couple of great tools to automate the 'flattening' process at astropix.com.

This shot I've already posted in the Perseid meteor shower thread.

Interesting is the colours of blue and orange were actually from different times through the exposure (blue sunset when I started shotting, and 30min later the orange/pink is light pollution from a city nearby)... by merging them you get a nice blend.

Also, this technique had the added bonus of reducing noise in the final shot (so I was happily shooting at ISO 1250.

[laungmai]

Wow! I can't wait to get back to New Brunswick to take photos of the stars. (my main reason why I bought the tripod hehe). It is too foggy where I live, and we barely get clear skies

Okay, this will truly show how novice I am, I am not sure what you mean by multiple exposure shots. Are you taking you more than one photo in sequence and putting them together?

Everyone's shots are so neat!

[the hank freid]

I haven't had the chance to try out star trail photography. But yesterday I got the Canon 10-22mm lens.Wondering if the wide angle lens work better for star trails? Or should I stick with 35mm and over, or prime lens like 50mm.

[rediguana]

I took the following at 10mm on my 10-22mm lens. Great for a wide angle, but to get long star trails you need a very long exposure (since the field of view is so wide and it takes a long time for the stars to move across the sky). To get those trails in this shot at 10mm took 24 minutes.