Star trails at Kelling Heath

[davew]

Kelling was a bit of a mist out this year, in fact I've never seen so much of the stuff there ! Thursday night was reasonable so I had a go at a " Proper " star trail image for a change. I used Sequator for the trail stacking as it's not too bad at the job so long as you don't have big gaps in the stars. The sheer speed of Sequator means you don't have to sit around for hours trying different settings. A wonderful little app.

Nikon Camera. Sigma 14mm lens. f2.8 at ISO 800 for 120 seconds X 30.

 

The next one is a small pano pointing North and showing the arching Milky Way. Unfortunately the area around Kelling has some strange light pollution and there's some bright red light a third the way in from the left and I've no idea what it could be. Not much there on the maps ! I sat on Kelling Halt platform. As you can see

Nikon camera. Sigma 14mm lens. f1.8 at ISO 1600 for 25 seconds x 5 panels. I held back on stretching the Milky Way and assembled the pano with Lightroom.

 

Dave.

[Grant]

Very nice images Dave and lovely to meet you at Kelling!

[Helen]

Lovely Dave!  Yes, Kelling was rather murky wasn't it! - I just did Friday-Monday ?  (but it was good to catch up with Grant, Daz etc...) 

Helen

[davew]

Thanks to both of you  It was nice to put a few faces to the names. It was a shame the weekend visitors had so little to see as the beginning of the week was rather good I hear. Thursday was good but due to the long drive I was in bed just after 2.00.

Dave.

[happy-kat]

Great images. Interesting to use sequator for star trail, I'll try that next time.

[Helen]

14 minutes ago, davew said:

Thanks to both of you  It was nice to put a few faces to the names. It was a shame the weekend visitors had so little to see as the beginning of the week was rather good I hear. Thursday was good but due to the long drive I was in bed just after 2.00.

Dave.

Yes, it is good to now know what you look like ?  

I did manage a little bit of viewing on Sunday night above the fog level - but everything got covered in dew so quickly it was a losing battle!  20 minutes with the binos before bed was good though.  A bit of solar Monday morning also got me fired back up (typing this under a blackout sheet while sharpcap is doing its bit ??)

Helen

[happy-kat]

Looking again I think you might have done a final layer of the foreground in photo program as sequators foreground exclusion control is not that fine and you have star trails through a tree.

[davew]

1 hour ago, happy-kat said:

Looking again I think you might have done a final layer of the foreground in photo program as sequators foreground exclusion control is not that fine and you have star trails through a tree.

Nah, I'm not that tricky  Well, not this time anyway. I used " Boundary line " to separate the sky and ground and included the tree in the sky. Tree doesn't move and the stars aren't tracked so it all just works.

If you try and use " Irregular mask " the whole thing falls apart and looks awful. I tried.

Dave.