Star Trail Attempts

I’ve mentioned getting back into long exposure photography here recently. I’ve had multiple setups for star trail photos lately. Below I’ll share a few of the setups:

The first one is the setup I’ve already shared out from out at Lake Monticello.

Star trail post from Lake Monticello

I then went back out to Lake Monticello a few days later but clouds and a missed focus setting on my part messed up the setup!

We had some rainy/cloudy weather so it was a few days before I could attempt this again. I went out late one night to setup for a capture. I noticed these “floating stars” at the horizon as I run my camera. They’d drift upward then sort of disappear. I just assumed it was Starlink satellites being launched from the west coast (maybe they are). The photos I’ve seen of Starlink satellites have always been a straight line but after I got back and stacked my images for the star trail I noticed quite a few in a wad on the horizon so I’m really not sure if these are Starlink satellites or some other launches but this capture was over about an hour’s time. If you have any thoughts please send me a message.

I’m thinking the bright star path towards the center in this photo might be a shooting star that I missed seeing. I did see a couple while I was out there but with all the “noise” on the horizon I’m not sure especially since I did not see it with my eyes. As I’ve mentioned these streaks on the horizon looked like slow floating stars that would sort of dissipate as they got higher but with the number I’m unsure what actually it is. The long streaks you see in this photo are airplanes going across the sky during the collection.

In editing I did a smaller subset of these photo to not have all the other stuff on the horizon. This is a short part of the collection that night but a pretty neat star trail to me.

I figured this would not be the image I was looking for so I did another setup for a few minutes trying to get a picture of a shooting star (I saw several) and to hopefully get a little better star trail.

I like the star trail photos when I get the north star in my photos. I use an app on my phone to locate it but sometimes I get off when pointing my camera.

Ok, tired of star trail photos yet? I have another recent try at it. I went this week down to Cut-Off Creek WMA to take a photo. My setup is looking towards the same tree from this post. I ran this setup for about 45 minutes then put the images together in Photoshop. As I ran the camera the sun was rising so the sky is a little brighter in this stack than some of my other star trails.

Most recent bird photos from Cut-Off Creek WMA

This is my favorite star trail photograph taken up at Lake Ouachita in 2015 (Little Fir Landing). The night sky up at Lake Ouachita is the best I’ve photographed in as far as “light pollution” goes from neighboring cities! It’s crazy this was 9 years ago!