[Theme] Show us your Star Trails!!!

[Chip Chipowski]

These are some great shots. Here is one my only star trails, from many years ago.  Annapurna region in Nepal

[Øivind Tøien]

I really love this one, thanks for posting.

[Olivier]

ooooh, these are great.
The key is to find a good foreground and to expose well, ideally for a very long time.
Modern techniques (stacking) allow actually to do star trails even in cities since light does not accumulate for more than typically 30 seconds in each shot, even for cumulative times of several hours.

i have done a technical trial in my garden in august, (X-T1, Nikkor 16mm fisheye) with a time of about 4 hours.
What I have learnt:
- I should find a place away from the airport
- the foreground sucks here...
- It is technically quite easy to do.

[Jakov Minić]

Olivier, this is impressive (as all your photos are)!
I love the planes!
How many images did you stack, and were all your exposures 30s?

[elsa hoffmann]

amazing shot Olivier - 4 hours hey - just to get those pesky planes in the shot !

[Olivier]

Yes, all pictures were 30s exposures. 500 runs if I remember well while I was sleeping! Very easy to do and to finish in PS.
Actually this was done in the middle of the night, when Charles de Gaulle airport (30km away) is supposed to be almost closed.
Had I done that earlier the picture would be filled with hundreds of plane trails. There is probably one every minute in daytime and in the evening, but not really a nuisance as they are already quite high and can barely be heard.
Actually I should repeat the experiment in winter when the night falls much earlier, just for the fun of having as many planes in the shot as stars. I could also do a longer exposure than in summer.
999 shots is the maximum with the timer, and it is likely anyway that the battery will not last longer. 999*30 sec = more than 8 hours. Hopefully I will not get too much condensation on the lens, this really ruins the shots...

[Jan Anne]

Interestingly different results with the stacked images, should try it one day.

Btw, where did the Pole star go in the stacked images

[Akira]

Olivier, that is spectacular!

[Olivier]

Jan Anne, it is visible on mine!
And I am fairly sure Peter's were shot in the southern hemisphere

[Jan Anne]

Well I don't see a bright fixed Pole star, only trails in both your and Peters images.

Fanie (SP) and I (NP) used single exposures and the Pole star is a fixed bright dot for both the South and North Pole star.

[HCS]

...
- I should find a place away from the airport

Please don't. The plane trails really add to the picture.

- the foreground sucks here...

Not so bad at all, but if you'd manage to find some modern tall buildings in the foreground, i'd feel you would really have a winner here.

Great shot !!

[Olivier]

Jan Anne, the Pole Star (Polaris) is not exactly at the pole, so it is perfectly normal it moves a bit when earth rotates.
look at the map at this page: http://www.sky-watch.com/skytour/umi.html
Polaris' coordinates are (found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris)
Right ascension    02h 31m 49.09s
Declination    +89° 15′ 50.8″
By definition, the pole is at a declination of +90°. So Polaris is almost at 45' from the pole. Remember this is more than the moon's apparent diameter in the sky (approx 30').

This has nothing to do with stacking ot not stacking!

HCS: thank you, you are being too kind. I made the shot to find the appropriate settings. Now let me find a good place. Fanie, for instance, found a much better one!
I wanted to do this while including the tallest erected stone in Eurome (Monhit de Kerloas in Brittany) but there was so much condensation on the lens that night that I finally gave up. There will be other opportunities...

[simato73]

Here is one, made with a different technique.
Loads (and I mean loads!) of 30s exposures, put together with StarstaX (free app).
Overall exposure time was ~2h30'

I concur with Olivier's statement about foreground and planes.

[Jan Anne]

Jan Anne, the Pole Star (Polaris) is not exactly at the pole, so it is perfectly normal it moves a bit when earth rotates.

This has nothing to do with stacking ot not stacking!

Yes I know and yes it does, kind of

In all my single half hour exposed images Polaris is a slightly off centre dot, apparently it does turn into a trail at multiple hour exposures. So it is not directly linked to the stacking itself but to the much longer exposures used for this method. Longer single exposures should show the same result as well however.

[Jan Anne]

Great contributions everybody, thanks for sharing the amazing images and the techniques used to acquire them.

Just out of curiosity, why do some prefer the stacking method over the single exposure method?

For me personally I like the single exposures because they enable me to combine the star trails with the ambient light only seen at long exposures, like the orange glow of the campfire and the green remnants of the Northern Lights in my second shot and the yellow glow from the villages in the valley below in the third shot.