Half-circle star trails
Half-circle star trails
After carefully aligning the tripod, I was sure I had Polaris in the center of the frame. Obviously, I was wrong. I wonder if I just need some more experience or other skill to better learn how to pick out Polaris and center the camera on it.
Regardless, this created a near-perfect half-circle of star trails, and I think it looks pretty slick.
This composite is made up of 1605 photos taken over two hours.
As more time elapses, the star trails get longer. However, the length of the trails isn’t simply affected by time: it’s exaggerated by a longer focal length lens. This was shot with a 50 mm lens. A photo showing two hours of trails shot with an 85 mm or 200 mm lens will look to have longer trails than this. Of course a longer lens is even more difficult to aim at Polaris.
See the original on Flickr.
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1605 PHOTOS?? How on earth did you do that? Why so many shorter exposures rather then fewer longer exposures?
Yep, 1605. The D300 has a built-in intervalometer, so it was easy to just set it and leave.
I used many short exposures because that negates the need for the camera's built-in noise reduction. The noise reduction would basically double each exposure time while the camera calculates the subtraction image -- so a 1 minute exposure would take 1 minute to complete the noise reduction process for a total of 2 minutes. Based on a previous attempt I know that even 10 seconds between exposures is long enough to cause the trail to look like pointilism, so that means an exposure of 30 seconds or a minute is way too long. (Of course, I could turn noise reduction off, but hot pixels on a star photo is confusing!)
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