The Flickr Startrailsexe Image Generatr

Taken literally from the front door of the house we were staying at in Dolgellau.

200mm
f5.6
ISO1600
20sec
x60

Nikon d5100
11mm
145 x 30 seconds
ISO 1250
f/3.5

This is what I could rescue from the failed star trails shoot I mentioned in an earlier post. It was somewhat of a failure due to the heavy atmospheric conditions that night with a high dew point causing my lenses to continually fog up. With a star trails shoot it's almost impossible to wipe a foggy lens without moving the camera and ruining the shoot so I had no choice but to prematurely stop it. I got about 145 useable images and this is the result. There was so many people there that night with cars driving past every few minutes which at least lit the foreground up for me quite nicely.

Nikon d5100
16mm
ISO 1250
f/3.5
628 x 30 seconds

Not quite another dusk til dawn star trails but not far off. This one went from the end of astronomical twilight at around 9pm until 2am. That's 628 individual shots across five hours. Again I got lucky with a local farmer who was out on patrol with a large spotlight so that helped to light paint the foreground and the abandoned farmhouse. Boddington is about 1.5 hours south east of Perth in Western Australia.

Nikon d5100
11mm
ISO 800
f/3.2
730 x 30 seconds

This is another star trails image stretching from the end of astronomical twilight (around 9.15pm) to the beginning of astronomical dawn (around 4am). The colourful trails are the result of a lower ISO and narrower aperture which allows the camera to capture the colours of the different stellar spectral types. The foreground was inadvertently light painted by a car which had stopped to see if I needed any help :)
This is the same lone tree I have featured in a few of my recent images, this time in all it's glory and not silhouetted. It sits on a farm paddock just outside of Beverley, about two hours east of Perth in Western Australia.

Nikon D5100
15mm
ISO 800
f/3.2
767 x 30 seconds

This is a 767 shot star trails image, beginning near the end of astronomical twilight (9pm) and ending just after the beginning of astronomical dawn (4am). It was taken at a small salt lake just east of Wagin, about halfway between the town and Lake Dumbelyung. The lake was completely dry with distinct pressure ridges across the dry salt surface. I shot this with my old D5100 while I was out shooting panoramas with my D5500 at other locations in the area.
A lot of people make the mistake of shooting star trails with a high iso and wide open aperture, this will blow out the natural colours of the different spectral star types and instead make them all white. Stopping down will get you the natural colour variations of those stars and give you nice colourful trails (with a bit of help in post processing!).

Nikon d5100
11mm
ISO 800
f/3.2
205 x 30 seconds

These days I only use my 5100 for star trails so on this night I set the camera up on a small jetty while I was taking Milky Way shots with my other camera. The lake was quite still for most of the night but towards the end the wind started to pick up a bit and disturb the surface of the lake so the reflections are a bit muddied because of it.

Nikon d5100
11mm
ISO 800
f/3.5
229 x 30s

This is a couple of hours worth of star trails taken at The Pinnacles Desert about two hours north of Perth in Western Australia. I used my old camera for this and let the intervalometer run until the battery ran out while I was off taking Milky Way shots with my other camera.

Nikon d5100
ISO 3200
f/2.8
12mm
411 x 30s

This is 3hr 25m of star trails at Yenyening Lakes about 2 hours east of Perth in Western Australia. This was shot using my old camera. I left it alone to automatically capture shots every 33 seconds until the battery died while I was out at other spots in the same area with my d5500. This is a system of lakes in the WA Wheatbelt area and lucky for me there was very little wind so the lake surface was like a giant mirror reflecting the starlight. In retrospect I should have captured more of the reflections on the lake so maybe next time...

Nikon d5100
12mm
366 x 30 seconds
ISO 200
f/3.5

Taken from the lookout point at Sugarloaf Rock, 250km south of Perth, Western Australia. The foreground was lit by the setting waxing gibbous moon.

Nikon d5100
326 x 30 seconds
11mm
ISO 400
f/3.5

Lake Ninan is a salt lake near Wongan Hills in Western Australia. This was taken while I waited for the Milky Way core to get a bit lower on the horizon.....if you have a few hours to kill, why not use them productively ;)
The bright pink streak was a lens flare I picked up on one of the early shots as I accidentally deactivated my car alarm.

Nikon d5500
11mm
100 x 30 seconds
ISO 200
f3.5

Processed in startrails.exe

Bluff Knoll is south west WA's tallest peak at 1100m. It's about the only place that has fairly regular snowfalls in the entire state. This was taken though in the middle of summer earlier this year during the first of January's two Super Moons, called the Full Wolf Moon. I'd almost forgotten about this image as it didn't quite turn out how I liked (I stupidly set the intervalometer incorrectly) and I contemplated whether to upload it at all. I drove 4 hours to this spot so I may as well get something out of it! ;-)

Nikon d5500
11mm
226 x 30 seconds
ISO 200
f/4

Processed in startrails.exe

This was taken earlier in the year at Island Point, a small recreational area about 30km south of Mandurah in Western Australia. I started shooting not long after sunset, taking a little over two hours to complete. I had chosen a spot not far from the water's edge, not taking into consideration the tides, but it wasn't long before the water started lapping at my tripod and by the end the legs was several inches under water. I was really lucky that the tripod didn't sink a single mm which would have ruined the entire shoot :)

Nikon d5500
325 x 30s
ISO 400
f/3.5
11mm

Processed in startrails.exe

This is a 3 hour exposure (325 images at 30 seconds each) of the Guilderton Lighthouse 125km north of Perth in Western Australia. The waning gibbous moon was below the horizon when I began and started moving above the horizon about two thirds of the way through, casting its ambient light on the lighthouse and adding a blue hue to the sky.

The weather forecast for the night was for light winds but when I got there it was absolutely howling, so much so that my car was being rocked by the wind. With star trail images, any slight knock on your tripod can ruin the final image so I'd already given up as soon as I saw how windy it was. But I'd come this far so I wasn't going home straight away! Luckily the wind wasn't nearly as bad behind the lighthouse and not a single image was affected. Phew!

In the past I had inadvertently overexposed the individual stars in my star trail images with a high ISO and wide aperture, this time though I lowered the ISO and stopped down the aperture to allow the colour of the stars to show, hence the colourful trails. Stars emit a different coloured light depending on their surface temperature with cooler stars emitting red/orange light and hotter stars emitting a blue light.

Nikon d5500
96 x 30 seconds
13mm
ISO 200
f/3.5

This was taken very early this morning at the end of my longest astrophotography trip yet. I drove 4.5 hours south of Perth to the Stirling Ranges to get another star trails image (it's the Milky Way offseason!) but I'm having a lot of trouble fixing my stupid mistake on that one.

Anyway, on the way back I stopped off at Lake Dumbelyung thinking the lake would be dry as it's the middle of summer here but it was still full, meaning all of the interesting parts were underwater. I was going to just head back home but thought I'd scout one last location and found this collection of dead trees near the shore.

All up it was a 16 hour trip and I might have just one photo to show for it! :-)

stacked of 3 images with StarTrails
www.startrails.de/html/software.html

Another shot from last weeks drive out to Burton.

A "quick" 20min Star Trail. the advantage of taking 2 cameras means i can set one up to take a star trail whilst i faff around with torches/light painting with the other camera. I liked how a passing cyclist lit up Sarahs car and the light off the phone lit up the interior.

Star trail taken over 90min with the moon rise looking like a fireball in the centre of the shot.

Taken overlooking the Mersey with Liverpool's John Lennon Airport to the left and Eastham Dock to the right. Not the greatest composition but it was the safest place for me to stash the camera whilst i went for a pint at the nearby pub and took a few shots in the woods with the trusty 550d to kill a bit of time. Unfortunately i had to leave a few photos out due to a tug boats light coming into shot on the right so i ended up with a large gap in the stars.

120 x 30 seconds
11mm
ISO 400
f/4.5

Processed in startrails.exe

This was taken maybe an hour after sunset, so towards the end of the Blue Hour. Sullivan's Rock is a granite outcrop with an altitude of around 300-350m above sea level in the Darling Ranges, approximately 40km east of Perth.

Quick Star Trail last night around midnight. I was going to leave the camera overnight and collect it in the morning but i couldn't find any suitable hiding places so i just set up the camera and had a lie down on the freshly harvested field for 20min, a few flashes here and there with the torch for the final few shots then headed home.

From the Perseid Meteor shower


Canon 6d
12mm fisheye
ISO 400
F2,8
30 second exposure
80 frames stacked