Star Trails

Posted by Jacob

Hi everyone,

Two days ago (Saturday), our family planned to go out to Lake St Clair for a  nice afternoon/night. Unfortunately, after the one and a half hour drive there, we sadly discovered that there was barely room to to do a cartwheel it was so packed. Dejected, we drove back and decided to pop in to the Hunter Valley Gardens to have dinner. it was a great opportunity to take some photos, and I took an abundance.

A technique I was really hanging to try out was 'star trails'. Star trails are when you psoition your camera straight up, and leave the shutter open for ridiculously long amounts of time. As you all know, stars appear to move across the night sky (in actualy fact, it's us that are moving). This means that your photograph will have streaks for stars. Bit  hard to explain, so I might just show you the couple of images, and then you can see what you think.

This is the best result of the night, also coinciding with the longest exposure. I think that the nicer star trails require a longer exposure, which in turn needs no (or not many) lights (which is a bit hard in a suburban neighbourhood). So next time we are out of suburbia, I will be jumping at the chance to take some more star trails. Oh and sorry about the image quality, I just had no luck getting the images to look even remotely nice... :(

Have a good week.