Apartment Star Trails

The other night I the stars were exceptionally bright, so I decided to see if I could pull of a decent time-lapse picture of them from my balcony. I started at 9:18 pm and took 30 second exposures for an hour. Unfortunately I have misplaced my remote shutter release, so I had to manually set it off. This was cause for a little more pause than I would have liked between exposures, and is noticeable when you view the picture up close. But, for my first star trail picture, I count it as a success!

Here’s how I did it (specifically):

Set up my tripod on the balcony, put the camera on it and aimed it where I wanted. Then I did a couple of test shots to make sure everything would look ok. After that, I put a camping chair outside with me (later Natalie joined me to keep me awake). I set the shutter speed to 30 seconds, and the ISO was as low as possible. The aperture was around 5 maybe, if I remember right. Might have been 8 or 10…

So I took a picture every 30 seconds for an hour, and then used photoshop to combine them all into one picture. When combined, you can see how much the stars moved in one hour (really how much the earth spun).

P.S. You can kinda see where an airplane flew by a couple of times, which annoyed  me greatly at the time, but I think it adds character now.

P.P.S. I could not have sat outside for an hour without the company and help of my lovely wife!!

Tagged: apartment, hurricane creek, long exposure, night, sky, star trails, stars, the lakes