If you can, we recommend driving out to somewhere a little more remote away from the bright lights of the suburbs or city.īecause the darker the sky, the more you can open up the exposure and aperture settings to get as much brightness and detail of the star trails possible. Things light street lights, building lights, cars all add to the ambient light pollution. You’ll notice that even while it may look dark in your backyard, there is usually quite a lot of light pollution from all around you. Light pollution can turn the most well-planned shoot into a nightmare. Simply set your month, year and whether your northern or southern hemisphere (it should auto pick this up) but always good to double check its correct. Check out this useful moon phase calendar, It’ll give you a whole months worth of moon phase so you can plan ahead. Luckily you don’t have to guess, there are some great tools online to check the moon phase for the following months. If the moonlight is too bright, it will make the stars look much dimmer and also doesn’t allow for long exposures as it’ll also wash out the image. Dark enough to see the full brightness of the stars but with a subtle amount of light to bring enough detail into the foreground objects in your images. Tip: photographing at 25% or less moon phase is an excellent range for capturing star trails. The brightness of the moon is useful for various astrophotography image effects, but when it comes to taking pictures of star trails were looking for the least amount of light possible. The following (moon, dark skies, weather, and location) all affect the end image result so definitely need to be taken into consideration before you load up your equipment and start capturing your star trails. Pre-planning is just as important as actually taking the picture because the best equipment in the world won’t do much if you’re trying to capture star trails on a cloudy night or on a full moon. We plan and set our specific exposure, aperture settings, ISO, and location. If you’re ready to get started in photographing star trails, there are a few things you really should do before you even touch your camera.īecause our goal is to capture the stars, which are only faintly visible to the naked eye. Once your camera is set up and ready to take photos, the capturing process can be as little as 30 minutes to several hours.Īll depending on how long you want the star trail effect to be in your images. How long does it take to get star trails?Įverything you need to capture star trail images can be done in a single night. This effect is achieved by aiming your camera at the south celestial pole or northern celestial pole (depending on where you are located in the world). Because of the rotation of the earth, you’ll get a straight line effect in your photos.Īppears to swirls around and around in a circular motion. To achieve this effect, it’s recommended to aim your camera in the direction of either east or west. The 2 Style Effects Of Star Trails You Can Captureĭepending on where in the sky you setup and point your camera to capture star trails you will get one of two effects, Star Lines Photography EffectĪppears to streak in a straight line across the sky. But really you can let your imagination run wild and be creative with different focal points that will give that contrasting effect with the night sky. Some ideas that I usually see are trees, mountains, and houses. So the foreground image is “fixed” while the background stars are “trailing” across the sky.Īs for the foreground object, it can be anything, as long as it is large enough. For that you’ll need an additional star tracker for you camera to move with the earths rotation to capture clear and sharp images. Star trail images are different to capturing sharp astro images of the night sky. It is a technique of astrophotography which captures the movement of the stars (the earth’s actually), and commonly has a fixed object as the point of focus in the foreground. If you’ve ever seen a night time image of the sky where the stars seem like they are streaked across the image, then you’ve seen a star trail image. 12) Conclusion So What Is Star Trail Photography?
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