Star trails with a hint of northern lights

[Altais]

Good evening everyone.

Thought I'd share with you my first ever star trail image, which I captured a couple of days ago.

 

It is 3 hours worth of 25 sec. exposures at ISO 1600 and F/4, taken with a Canon EOS 70D using a kit lens. The effective focal length is about 40 mm. 

I was especially pleased to discover that some northern lights had made its way into some of the frames just above the treetops.

You might be able to see some "wigglyness" to the star trails, which I think is due to vibration caused by the shutter. Next time I'll shoot in live view to avoid that. The moon was quite strong, but luckily it didn't wash out the trails as I feared it might.  It actually gave the sky a rather nice blue colour, and lit up the foreground nicely as well. I guess the moon isn't necessarily pure evil when it comes to star trail shooting (as opposed to deep sky shooting..).

Feedback is as always appreciated.

Clear skies,

Lars

[happy-kat]

That is a super image.

Live view will heat up the camera probably not a good idea. You can get fairly cheap intervalometers I got mine from Amazon for 13GBP, set it up and let it do it's thing.

[Altais]

Just now, happy-kat said:

That is a super image.

Live view will heat up the camera probably not a good idea. You can get fairly cheap intervalometers I got mine from Amazon for 13GBP, set it up and let it do it's thing.

Thanks! 

That's a good point about heating. I was actually thinking about getting an intervalometer, so I can get a bit more flexibility with the exposures without having to connect a laptop.

[Debo]

Super image 

[laudropb]

Very nice image.

[Star101]

Thats very nice image, even with the waves.

Something I would love to try to do. I doubt I could achieved anything close to that though. 

Thanks for sharing. 

[Daniel-K]

very nice. great location  

[Altais]

Thanks everyone.

Here is a second attempt that I shot a couple of nights later. I wanted to get a more natural foreground without buildings and artificial light.

 

 

Clear skies,

Lars

 

[Mr Spock]

Nice looking images. Does you camera have a mirror lock? That would solve the vibration.

[Altais]

On 3/23/2017 at 19:13, Mr Spock said:

Nice looking images. Does you camera have a mirror lock? That would solve the vibration.

Thank you.

It has. However, I see no way of making use of it without an intervalometer, but perhaps I've missed something. The second image was actually shot in live view mode though. I found that the procedure that created the least amount of vibration (in the absence of an intervalometer) was to use silent continuous shooting in live view mode.

[happy-kat]

I don't get any noticeable wiggle from shutter vibration I think it has a lot to do with sturdiness of mount.