Star Trails

The weather since Christmas has been a little too cold to get out and ride. I don't mind the break but will probably do some mountain biking if it doesn't warm up soon. This break has given me a little time to experiment with my camera and do some long exposures of the night sky. I don't have a good DLR camera just a decent point and shoot. My camera does allow me to take long exposures of 15 seconds but this is really not long enough to get a good picture of the night sky. There is however some free software that you can use to stack a few hundred photos to get exposure of a couple of hours. This allows you to get some pretty cool long exposure shots that wouldn't normally be possible with a cheap camera. You can see my results of the first few tries from my backyard here. These aren't real spectacular shots but it proved the technique.

To create these photos I used two pieces of software. The first one was the Canon Hack kit that you can find here. The Canon Hack kit allows me to run a script that automatically takes a photo every so many seconds. This allows me to set up the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds for hours at a time. This way I just put the camera on the tripod pointed it at the night sky, push a button and walk away for a few hours. When I come back I now have a couple hundred long exposure pictures of the sky.

To create the star trail photo I had to stack all the photos together into a single image. This can be a tedious process in a program like Photoshop but luckily some one spent their free time creating a program to do this and best of all it is free. It is called Startrails application and you can find it here. It is simple to use and produces great results.  All you have to do is point the program to a folder that contains all the pictures and it will automatically stack all the pictures. It will also alternatively make a video out of the photos which I did here.

With the software the process is pretty simple. It only take a few minutes to create the star trail photo. So now that I have everything set up I will probably take some more of these when the sky is clear. With a little better composition I should be able to get some pretty cool shots.