Playing With Some Stars at Pine Bay

Every year, my daughter and I make a trek to the 1000 Islands area along the St. Lawrence River for Memorial Day, and each year I tackle a different type of Astrophotography project.  This year it was playing with Star Trails, which is oddly something I had never done before.

Here’s the gist – take a photo of the sky with a moderate exposure time. For this experiment, I chose 45s.  The next bit is to do this for as many consecutive exposures as you can achieve.

The image above is made up of 205 individual frames shot at 45s intervals, at f/2.8 and ISO 3200 using a Canon Ra camera.

To process the data, I used StarStaX to combine the images into the photo shown above.  You can also use StarStaX to make a timelapse video of the data as shown below.  There are bunches of YouTube videos showing how to do this.

Further playing with the data, I was able to make this time lapse video which came out pretty cool: