Star trails: eight of the best
Our favourite long-exposure shots of the night sky
Star trails are easy enough to capture in principle. You take your camera, aim to the north and at the sky, and then either leave the shutter open for a few hours or take a bunch of quicker shots and stack them together in free bits of software like DeepSkyStacker. There are plenty of good how-to guides on the web.
But in practice they’re a little harder to make beautiful. You tend to need some good foreground, a sharp, fast, wide-angle lens, a sturdy tripod, a remote cable release and a whole lot of patience.Here are eight of our favourite shots.
The European Southern Observatory provided this beautiful shot of star trails over its 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, which hosts HARPS — the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter.
Mallorcan programmer Andrés Nieto Porras took this lovely shot of star trails behind a house. The rest of his work is well worth a look, too — it’s heavy on the Photoshop, and very fantastical, but the results are often impressive.
This lovely image was captured by Dan Eckert in the Santa Rosa mountains in Southern California. You can see it, and several others in motion in this wonderful piece of film he put together, called Space Ship Earth.
Here are some wonderful black-and-white star trails over the Greek temple of Poseidon in 2010, taken by photographer Dimitris Drougoutis. It was shot with a Canon 1000D, which proves you don’t need equipment costing thousands of dollars to get a fantastic result.
This impressive shot was taken in Fort Sumner in New Mexico by Zach Dischner during an all-nighter he pulled while preparing for a high-altitude balloon launch. “We spent pretty much every minute in this hanger, getting everything ready to go,” he explains.
We love the textures and colours that Macedonian photographer Marjan Lazarevski has put into this shot, taken near Kozjak Lake in Macedonia. Kozjak is an artificial lake, formed by a huge hydroelectric dam that provides 82 megawatts of power.
These star trails were captured over a field near Dummer in the UK on 2 April 2013. “Saw this spot driving home from work earlier today and figured it would be perfect. I don’t think i was disappointed!” said photographer Thomas King.
Finally, it’s hard to beat star trails taken from space. This image was taken by astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station in 2012 during Expedition 31, and posted on Nasa’s Flickr account.
Have you taken a photo of star trails that you’re incredibly proud of? Email us a link, and we might include it in a future post.
Looking Up is a collection on Medium that offers a home to those obsessed with the world above our heads. It’s curated by @duncangeere. If you enjoyed it, please click the “recommend” button below, and if you want more, then click the “follow” button to make sure you don’t miss anything we publish in the future.
