Today we had basically no moon appearance today and, unusually, a cloudless evening sky so I popped out and set up my camera to shoot a star trail from our back garden…and here it is!
I only realised the evening was going to be perfect for some astro photography late on and tried to get my star tracker to work. I fell at the first hurdle and couldn’t even connect it’s wi-fi, so a star trail was the next best thing.
This shot is made of some 170 x 25 second photographs (about 70 mins of pictures). I would have had more but the lens got frost on it which obscured much of the view after this time so I was limited to that. I then used some software called StarStaX which works really well at stacking all the images together to give this effect. Sadly, I just guessed at the location of the North Star rather than taking some time to line it up properly so we don’t get the star trail centered as it should be.
Still, a good bit of fun and more learning to produce a decent image. I’ve also produced a little stop motion movie of how it all came together:
Now to get my Star Tracker working!
