Star Trails

Star Trails, and astro photography is something that I do enjoy doing as a photographer, as I love looking up to the sky at night and seeing how many stars there are up there and just soaking in the scale and majesty of it all.

This last Saturday we headed out to Magpie Mine in the Peak District which is a really good spot for being able to see the sky. I don't believe it is classed as a dark skies location, but it is between Sheffield and Manchester so one way you have Sheffields ambient light and in the other Manchesters with a sweet spot in the middle.

When shooting star trails too, we identify Polaris, the North Star, as this doesn't move in the sky, but as the earth resolves, it looks like the stars are revolving around it. The process of creating the shots below is to stack them in photoshop so that the individual stars as dots, start to look like lines.

Below is Polaris above Magpie Mine, and consisted of 455 individual shots, shot at ISO5000, F3.5, at 8 seconds. When stacking the shots yesterday I wanted to store the PSD file, but due to the size, I had to use PSB (Photoshop large format file) and due to getting nervous at the size I created 2 documents at 13GB and 16GB which I later merged..

Below I have also added some previous star trail shots. One of my first examples is below with the traffic sign in the bottom corner. This was shot close to home and next to the car so we sat in the warm for an hour while the below completed..

And below we have the Wentworth Needle..

Near to myself is a small village, and the below shot was taken in the cemetry at around midnight (Good job I'm not superstitious!)

Flamborough Head, although this is a composite I created, both from shots taken by myself..

And finally the practice shots from my back garden which luckily faces North..

As a photographer I try to mix what I do in my shots, I've done still life, some macro work, lightpainting and I enjoy a good model shoot. If you'd like to check out any of my other work I'm on Facebook, or you can find me on Instagram under neilru75

Thanks very much for looking

Kind Regards, Neil