Star trails with a little DASH of fun!
By Meghana K
29 February 2008
Start trails are real fun to make. I am lucky to have a wonderful terrace to stay up all night on and watch stars.
Last year, I made my first star trail photograph with a friends Nikon FM2. I exposed the film for 75 minutes. It was a grand success with the film even capturing the dashed light streak of of an aircraft flying overhead!
Another time I did a long exposure of traffic, I found a dashed streak of light on the film made by a scooter with a flashing indicator! That was really something. I had also read about this technique somewhere on the internet about a dashed star trail. I thought it was pretty cool, and decided to try it out myself. Here's how I did it:
I set up my Canon 400D with a fully charged battery on my tripod on the terrace on a dark moonless night. Included a few branches of trees in the for depth. Set the camera on manual bulb mode, aperture to f/18 and ISO speed 100, and started exposure.
Every five minutes of exposure time, i covered the lens with the lens cap for 2 minutes. This way, by the end of the 49 mins and 38 seconds of exposure, I got wonderful dashed star trails! I didn't want to expose for more than 50 minutes to an hour because it was my first trial of such a long exposure with my DSLR. And the image takes an equivalent time to process for noise reduction. So I was worried the battery would run out of juice.
But when I saw the result, I was very happy. The next dashed star trails I will make will be surely far away from the city, with no light pollution and the north star visible!
TIP: I did this alone. And I had my music with me... Listening to your favourite music with this will make it even more fun!
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