My First Ever Star Trails

Firstly, I can not believe that it has been nearly 9 months since I last put together a blog post.  Not that I haven't been doing anything astro related.  I have (other then the usual lull during the Summer).  Going back through my pictures and notes, I realised that I hadn't actually written about any of them.  Time to put that right.

This post is about something that I did during our holidays to France last Spring.  In March '23 we were fortunate enough to be able to spend a few days in the South of France staying with some good friends.  I hadn't intended taking much in the way of astro gear with me, but I nearly always go with my DSLR.  I had also recently treated myself to a new pair of Celestron Skymaster binoculars, so I packed them, along with a couple of recent issues of the BB Sky at Night magazine and off we went.

I'd noticed an article in one of the magazines written by Mary McIntyre which was a tutorial on how to take star trail pictures, and how to stack them to produce a final image all using free software.

We've been to France many times on holiday, and the area we usually visit has superb dark skies.  But we always seem to time it with either full moon, or in periods of time when the weather isn't playing ball.  This time we lucked out, and we had several clear nights on the bounce.

I had a great time showing our friends numerous deep sky objects as I gave them impromptu binocular tours of the night sky over several nights.  We observed Jupiter, Saturn and a host of clusters and brighter galaxies.

Reading Mary's article in the magazine, I picked up some brilliant tips and hints on how to take the individual frames needed for a start trail image.  As it happens, we both have the Canon EOS 1100d camera, so that was a good start!.  After dinner one evening, I picked up my camera bag, tripod, chair, head torch and binoculars before heading off on a short walk to some more open ground where I could get a better view of the wider night sky.  After setting up and then encountering some passing wild boar in the pitch black (not sure who may who jump first) I got set up and went about starting to take the images.  

It's a while back since I did it, so I can't recall the exact settings or numbers of frames I took, but I stayed put for probably around a couple of hours, clicking away and carrying on with some binocular observations.  What I do remember though was eventually, it was the dew on the camera lens that forced me to stop in the end.  I don't have a proper dew heater for my camera lenses, so I had to take what I had and made my way back home.

The next day, following the steps in the magazine article, I downloaded the software I needed, and went on to stack the individual images.  To say I was really chuffed with the final result was an understatement!  I never thought I would be able to put together such an image with such ease.  Obviously, I then started to critique my own work and soon made a mental list of all the things I could have done better.  Nevertheless, a really pleasing start!

And the final result?  Well, here it is, complete with lens flare and a plane trail!  Now, I just need to make time to have another go at it!

Thanks for reading 😊