Software to simulate star trails for a given lat and long.

[Longinthetooth]

Hi folks - having installed an All Sky camera I'm now able to easily generate star trails and I love the way they bring out star colours.  This resulted in me thinking "I wonder which blue star made that trail?" This swiftly  became "I wonder if there is software which would help me identify the stars making the trails". I tried googling the title of this post but was unable to find strictly relevant suggestions. I use Stellarium to inform my observing targets and it can simulate a view with the celestial north pole in the centre but I don't think it adds star trails?  Perhaps there is an alternative that would do this? Or maybe it's a feature which could be added to existing software?

[vlaiv]

It could probably be added to software but it would depend on lens used.

Wide angle lens have pretty serious distortion (fish eye thing), so things are not straight forward.

Your best bet is to measure distance from Polaris to star trail and figure out Declination from that (need to plate solve at least one single frame to get idea of arc seconds per pixel but also what level of distortion lens produces). Start and end of a trail in combination with start and end time of recording could provide further clues for figuring out Right ascension for a given star.

 

[Longinthetooth]

Wow! Vlaiv! It does sound more complicated than I thought!