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Star Trails
posted Tuesday, 12 May 2015, 18:26 (+0800), by Martin
star trails
star trails
Lake Leschenaultia, Mundaring, Western Australia
Canon EOS 50D, Sigma 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art @35mm, 119 frames at 30 sec, f/3.5, ISO1600

Here is another photo from our night sky shoot at Lake Leschenaultia on Saturday night. This photo was created by stacking 119 photos, and each of those photos was a 30 second exposure.

I used my Phottix Aion intervalometer to trigger the camera, and had to clean up a few of the frames, due to some random stranger on the other side of the lake shining his torch directly at us.
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Comments:
Richard wrote at 2015-05-13 10:05

WOW! Can you explain how the stacking technique works? Were the 119 photos taken from the same position over a longer period of time, i.e. effectively the same result as a super long exposure lasting minutes/hours?

Martin wrote at 2015-05-13 12:13

@Richard: Yes, all 119 photos were taken from the same position, with my camera mounted on a tripod, and triggered with a Phottix Aion intervalometer. The photos were taken consecutively, with a second or two between exposures.

Stacking the photos was a matter of loading them all into Adobe Camera Raw, applying some lens perspective correction. I then selected them all in Adobe Bridge, and opened them all as layers on a single image in Photoshop, and changed the layer blend mode to "lighten". This blend mode allows the lightest pixels from each layer to be selected, resulting in an image that contains all the lightest components from each of the 199 separate frames.
A few frames had to be manually cleaned up due to too much torch light from some random stranger on the other side of the lake.

Richard wrote at 2015-05-14 11:51

Amazing result! So the outcome of this process would reflect the movement of the stars over a half hour period approximately?

For some stunning time-lapse sequences of the night sky, you really must check out the footage by expert cinematographer Ron Frickes in his remarkable films "Baraka" (1992) and "Samsara" (2011). In fact, watch the entire films, they're quite genre breaking, and I suspect that they would strongly appeal to photographers. See a sample clip here.

Martin wrote at 2015-05-14 12:00

@Richard: no, the results show the movement of the stars over a one hour period (119 x 30 seconds).

I have seen some of Ron Frickes' work before - amazing stuff!

Richard wrote at 2016-08-23 17:20

The time lapse photography of the night skies in the Ron Fricke films is terrific. It seems that someone has posted the entire Baraka film in high quality here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCrLsjn9lwI

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