Star Trails Niko D3100

[Aussie Dave]

This is my second attempt at star trails. The first was way back in the early 80's on black and white film.

Taken on a camera tripod with Nikon D3100, stock 18mm lens, ISO 200, F5.6, 7434 seconds (123 mins, 54 secs). Imaging in NEF (RAW) and JPG and took a couple of dark frames after. The image below is the jpg shot converted to png.

As you can see I have some light pollution towards the South. The brighter area from the bottom left of the shot is the Milky Way bulge and the lighter smudge center right is the Large Magellanic Cloud.

With that long of an exposure the image was almost white so there was a lot of editing. It was peppered across most of the image with hot pixels and very noisy so I've lost heaps of detail and fainter star trails.

Still quite happy with the result and the camera is again eating photons at the moment for it's second test with a smaller aperture.

[laudropb]

Very nice Dave.

[happy-kat]

Wow you get to see the Magellanic cloud.

Was that one image? Amazing end result mine would be solid white/orange.

There is a free star trails application where you can create an image from a lot of single frames say each one  x seconds long, the name is escaping me right now. It is like DSS but for star trails.

[Aussie Dave]

10 hours ago, laudropb said:

Very nice Dave.

Thanks Laudropb.

 

10 hours ago, happy-kat said:

Wow you get to see the Magellanic cloud.

Was that one image? Amazing end result mine would be solid white/orange.

There is a free star trails application where you can create an image from a lot of single frames say each one  x seconds long, the name is escaping me right now. It is like DSS but for star trails.

Yes just a single very long exposure Happy-Kat. Can see the Magellanic cloud by eye, just. Maybe you could try a shorter single exposure with smaller aperture next time to test, 200ISO or even less. It sounds like your sensor is more sensitive than mine. Even with gusty winds here, my shot came out ok.

I downloaded an app called StarStax last night, have yet to try it. There's Startrails too and a couple of others to use to create star trails from multiple shorter exposures. This seems to be how you do it with digital cameras. I can test the StarStax app out that I downloaded with the imaging session I had a few nights back with the 85 x 20 second exposures.

I'm not sure if taking super long exposures is a good idea for the camera sensor.

The last test shot from last night was destroyed by cloud rolling in from the ocean in the last 30 minutes of the exposure. Clouds can roll in or just appear from nowhere within 10 minutes and cover the entire sky here.

[happy-kat]

I guess it would be something to research re sensor damage with exposures that long.

Very envious of all your clear nights :-) rain again here.

Hope you have success with creating star trails from the other night's data.