Star trails

The equipment used for taking pictures of star trails or for making animated star trails is very much the same as for doing time lapse videos. Any off the shelf camera can be used as long as it can be put on a tripod and that it has a manual over ride so that you set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO, etc. A remote shutter release (intervalometer) is essential as well. Although you can take one very long exposure ie several hours, this is not practical due to battery life, thermally induced noise, etc. So the easiest method is to take multiple exposures and then use a programme such as Photoshop or Starstax to layer all the images together. It is also possible using a facility in Starstax to save each step individually after each image is stacked, this creates several hundred images where the first one has no trailing and the last one has full trailing, when these are rendered to video you get an animated star trail as seen in the clips above. The static star trail image and animated star trail movie were both taken from the same trip out to Ribblehead Viaduct