Star Trails Tutorial

Star Trails Tutorial

I had mentioned in my about me section that I am a communications graduate but emphasized in photojournalism. I love taking photographs of the night sky. Star trails are beautiful and an easier way to start an amateur photographer into astrophotography. What are star trails? They are a compilation of photographs (a lot of photographs) put together in an photo editing software to show the movement of Earth relative to the stars. 

Photograph by Asia Sansalone

Things you need for your star trails:

1. DSLR Camera

2. Wide Angle lens/lens that will get you a large portion of sky

3. Tripod 

4. Remote timer

5. Very Dark Sky

6. Photo Editing Software

7. Clear Weather

8. Time

Tutorial For Awesome Star Trail Photos:

1. Get your camera set up.  Set up your camera on a sturdy tripod in a very dark place outside pointed into a composed picture ( you can add trees/rocks/houses in the fore ground to give it some depth)

2. Focus your shot. For this you must turn your camera to manual focus. Point you camera at a very bright star and focus your lens until the star becomes sharp and clear. Try hard not to bump you lens from this point on. (This can be kind of hard especially if the moon is in the sky) 

3. Find your exposure. When it comes to photographing the stars, exposure time is probably the most important. Usually it falls with in the 15sec-30sec range depending if the moon is out or you are in a more light polluted area (next to a city). Exposure is determined by your shutter speed and ISO settings. My ISO is usually around 1600 when I am shooting star trails. 

4. Connect your remote timer. The remote timer allows you to be able to hook up your camera and chill out for a few hours while your camera is doing all of the work. Set your timer for as many pictures is can take possible at an interval of 0 seconds and the exposure time for about 30 secs ( I say about because where you are located and if there is a moon in the sky can change the exposure length any where from 15 secs to 30 seconds)

5. Leave your camera. After you have your shot set up and remote timer ready to go, you can leave your camera where it is for a few hours. Watch a favorite movie, read a book, or have a picnic outside. The longer you have the camera out shooting the more star trails there will be. The shot above took about 4 hours and consisted of compiling about 346 pictures.

6. Pick your photo editing software. I have two ways of compiling my star trail pictures. One way is I use photoshop (it takes a little longer) and the other is free star trail software called StarStax. StarStax is rather self explanatory but photoshop has a number of ways you can achieve the stair trail photograph. 

7. Photoshop Startrails (made easy)

You can also do this in Photoshop by going to File -> Script -> Load Files Into Stack and then click OK. Wait for all the images to load, and then select all the layers and change the blending mode to Lighten. Try experimenting with different blending modes to get the desired effect. 

There is also a photoshop action you can use to do the same thing but I feel like you don't have as much control but you can download that here

Photo by Asia Sansalone

You can play around with exposure and shutter speed to change how your star trails will look. I would love to help you all if you have any questions. PS. you can also point your camera at the north star to get circular star trail patterns!

Please ask questions if you need anything clarified! I would love to see some of your examples of star trails!