Spinning star trails

Spinning star trails

I’ve made several attempts at capturing star trails where I wanted to capture Polaris in the center of the frame. My previous attempts were aligned "by eye," and that technique failed me repeatedly.

Last night I aimed the camera precisely at 41.7° and found Polaris without much trouble. (I used the iPhone app iHandy Level to set this.) The exposure could be a little longer to create some brighter stars. This image is made up of 964 three second exposures spanning one hour.

Sidenote: trying to verify a star is in the frame (through the viewfinder or LCD) is a challenge because it’s so small. Even looking at the stars on the computer is a little challenging because the scale of the monitor compared to the sky is so different.

See the original on Flickr.