This is in Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. I had one camera aimed to the SE to capture the Milky Way Theodore Roosevelt National Park | Focal World And so I had this one pointed North to capture the stars roatating around Polaris. I purposely composed this so that Polaris was off to the upper right compared to that small little peak. I thought they would balance well. I had walked this short path earlier and thought it would also be cool if I could get the pathway into the image.
This image consists of 40 images that were stacked in Startrails, a free program you can download. I have been using it for years. It also has an option where it will make the leading edge of the star trail brighter and the trailing end to fade away. So I chose that for this. I have several hours of data I could have turned into Star trails, but a test of just 1 hour worth of data resulted in a sky that had almost no blue as the stars when turning filled up the whole sky. So I tried 40 and liked the look.
25 secs
ISO4000
f2.8
Nikon D810
Sanyang 14mm f2.8 Mk2
There was no moon on that night. I could have used the ground layer after stacking the 40 images as it cleaned it up pretty nice. But I had an early morning shot before the sun rose that gave me a lot more detail for the ground, so this is an 80% blend in with the existing ground. Since I was stacking anyway, I figured a little blending to bring up the detail in the ground layer was worth it.
As a side note, of the 40 frames, all but 4 of them had airplane trails in it. I was really surprised since being up in North Dakota is like no mans land, I didn't think there would be many airplanes flying at night. So I had to go through each of the 40 frames by hand to clean up those airplane trails as they look horrible in the star trail image if not removed, and it would be cleaner to remove them before stacking then after.
Also, I noticed a lot, and I mean a lot of meteors in those 40 frames also. Maybe 10 to 12? I also cleaned those out as I wanted the clean star trail look. But I might go back and blend in some of those meteors into this to see how that looks. I don't know if it would look cool, or be a distraction.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
This image consists of 40 images that were stacked in Startrails, a free program you can download. I have been using it for years. It also has an option where it will make the leading edge of the star trail brighter and the trailing end to fade away. So I chose that for this. I have several hours of data I could have turned into Star trails, but a test of just 1 hour worth of data resulted in a sky that had almost no blue as the stars when turning filled up the whole sky. So I tried 40 and liked the look.
25 secs
ISO4000
f2.8
Nikon D810
Sanyang 14mm f2.8 Mk2
There was no moon on that night. I could have used the ground layer after stacking the 40 images as it cleaned it up pretty nice. But I had an early morning shot before the sun rose that gave me a lot more detail for the ground, so this is an 80% blend in with the existing ground. Since I was stacking anyway, I figured a little blending to bring up the detail in the ground layer was worth it.
As a side note, of the 40 frames, all but 4 of them had airplane trails in it. I was really surprised since being up in North Dakota is like no mans land, I didn't think there would be many airplanes flying at night. So I had to go through each of the 40 frames by hand to clean up those airplane trails as they look horrible in the star trail image if not removed, and it would be cleaner to remove them before stacking then after.
Also, I noticed a lot, and I mean a lot of meteors in those 40 frames also. Maybe 10 to 12? I also cleaned those out as I wanted the clean star trail look. But I might go back and blend in some of those meteors into this to see how that looks. I don't know if it would look cool, or be a distraction.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
