Poletrails

I picked up a new 50mm Canon EF 50mm F1.8 lens at the weekend and couldn't wait for a good clear night. Tonight offered a short clear spell between clouds and showers. I thought I'd try a polar star trails shot, but given that my back garden faces north over the city I wasn't expecting much. So I decided to reduce exposure times and stack them. Canon 350D, Canon EF 50mm F1.8 @ F2.8 ISO200 and 23x30sec exposures. Can't wait to try this out on a clear night with no clouds.



Regards,

John Murphy
IAS
flickr.com/photos/jcmurphy

No sign of LP there. did you process it much?
also what prog did you use to stack them, there are a few out there
and I haven't tried any of them yet.

Frank,

I did do a little LP reduction in Photoshop, but the main reduction in LP comes from stacking using Startrails (freeware at startrails.de/html/software.html . This is pretty seamless stuff. Shoot in Jpeg by setting the camera on continuous shooting and leave the remote switch on. Add a few darks shot the same way at the end and the program will do the rest. This method also allows foreground items such as buildings/trees/whatever to be included. You could use the flash at the start of the exposure to illuminate your foreground and with the addition of many frames build up a good SN ratio on dark foregrounds. I will be playing with this every chance I get in the coming months.

Thanks John.
I hear Startrails is the prog of choice for DSLR trail shooters.

Nice work John, I never heard of the StarTrails software. I like taking lots of trails when I can, and like you (until now) wondered about taking shorter sequences and then stacking them. You got a pretty good result. Tell me, if viewed at full size from the Canon, would you see gaps between the stacks of the time lost bewteen taking each exposure? Know what I mean?

Seanie.

Seanie_Morris wrote:

Tell me, if viewed at full size from the Canon, would you see gaps between the stacks of the time lost bewteen taking each exposure? Know what I mean?

Just found the answer to my question - yes! I saw your flickr page in your sig and had a look at the original sized image. Impressive the amount of detail you caught, but the software doesn't allow it to seamless are larger picture frames especially on the longer trails further out from Polaris. However, at small or medium, you got an impressive result as the technique sure beats sodium glow. I think more practise myself will help, so I'm going to download it, thanks for the tip John!

Seanie.