My first outing to capture star trails coincided with howling winds, a nearly full moon and mostly cloud cover - none of which are optimal for capturing star trails! Neither is shooting south over the city lights (I live north of the city), but for my first attempt at star trails I was happy to give it a go anyway!
Composing while imaging the stars rotating around the (invisible) South Pole was a bit tricky (I actually thought the pole was a little farther left). Once we had set up the shot (manual, f4, 30 sec, iso 200) and locked off the shutter, I sat in the middle of the field of flowering grasses for as long as my allergies would allow (nearly 2 hours I think).
The standalone free Starstax program used to stack the images ( http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/StarStaX/StarStaX.html#usage) is easy to use, but the settings confused me a little. I later found another stacking program ( http://www.startrails.de/html/software.html) which I found even easier (there are almost no settings!) and it created an image with even more stars than in this shot, but a little more noise. Startrails program can also make .avi movies of the series of JPG files.
I found setting up for a shot that is 'real', but did not exists in 'real-time' a bit trippy. It would take a lot of planning to nail the composition for this type of shot, but hey, this one is 'mine' and this is all about learning...!! :))
Thanks go to Bec for letting me tag along & learn from her :)
Awesome first time. I have tried over a year ago and have yet to even try putting my images into a stacking program! Will look into the programs you mentioned. Fav
