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This morning I made a serious attempt at photographing star trails. Rather than sitting out in the cold for a few hours on my own I decided that to get a method down I'd try shooting out my window, allowing me to stay inside in the warm and also use my computer to remotely take photos for me. This way I could watch a dvd while seeing photos magically be downloaded onto my computer without having to press a shutter button or time exposures manually.

I'd had a previous attempt last night, messing around taking shots out my window and got to an exposure time of 990 seconds for a single photo. After managing two of these my battery gave up as it wasn't fully charged to start but with two images I could test out the stacking of the photos to see how it would go.

Today I decided that I would go with a 5 minute exposure at ISO 100. The forecast was set for partially cloudy but hopefully it would stay clear enough for long enough. I set everything up to take a 5 minute exposure every 5 minutes, 1 second - the shortest interval I could set in my remote capture software, and left it running for just over 2 hours. When 03:00 rolled round I figured it was time for bed and I'd see what I'd got, if anything in the morning.

After a bit of a sleep I could check out the captures with a clear head. Stacking all 24 images at once didn't seem to be working as cloud had moved into the picture at some point, washing out the sky to a featureless grey in place, ruining the star trails. I decided to track back through the images to look for where the clouds appeared and stack the images previous to from that. Much to my annoyance I saw that only the first 4 images had no or little cloud interference. Never the less, I wouldn't lose anything by trying those so after a bit of playing in PTAssembler, a program I use for panoramas which can also exposure stack, and Photoshop I came up with the composite 20 minute exposure below (it looks better at original size - the algorithm that shrinks images in Drupal sucks. Click on the image which will take you to another page with a link for original size).

Star Trails Trials: An attempt at star trails while in the comfort of my home. Four exposures of 5 minutes, stacked and then modified in Photoshop for contrast.

I thought it might be interesting to also post a couple of outakes from the set, both from when I was checking exposures and the framing of the image. I wanted to get tree, house and polaris in the picute while leaving out the frame of the window which the camera was sat behind. The first shows reflections caught in the image from the window. It's given the picture light streams running through it that look vaugely magical. I solved this problem for the picture above by MacGyvering a hood for the camera, much like you see on those old cameras where the photographer sticks his head behind a blanket to stop light entering the back of the camera. I taped my cycling jacked around the camera and the window which seemed to work well.

Outake from Star Trails Trial - Reflections: This is an outake from my trails at photographing star trails. Reflections in the window have given a photo that has some sort of magical looking light beams through it.

The final outake is an aircraft passing. I like the way the side lights can be seen blinking and the distance between the blinks illustrates how far away the aircraft is at the time.

Outake from Star Trails Trial - Plane: This is another outake from my trial at photographing star trails. This one has a plane running through it.