Star trails are the very best first project for someone new to astrophotography,
and in this video I'm going to show you everything that you need to do to capture
and process both Star Trails photos and Star Trails time lapses like this [Music]
and we're going to do this completely on your iPhone [Music]
so let's Jump Right In The only things you'll need physically are an iPhone I'm
using the iPhone 13 in this video but any iPhone will work and some kind of
tripod or other way to keep the iPhone very steady while we're taking the pictures of the stars
in this video I'm using a little smartphone clamp attached to my normal tripod but I've also
had great success with a 12 generic smartphone tripod that I got off of Amazon so you don't have
to spend a lot of money on this project that one worked great what I liked about the design of this
cheap one that I got is I can put it anywhere and travel with it very easily I've tried placing it
on my car on a table on a trash bin the only thing is since it's not very tall it's probably not the
best tripod to use on the ground and that's it for physical items all you need is your iPhone
with a fully charged battery and some space and the tripod that you can put your iPhone on in
the digital realm we need a few different apps and a couple of those do cost a few dollars to
download but I think it's well worth it for what they can do they're not subscription based it's
one-time fee and then you have them forever so let's go through the apps one by one the first
app is stellaria mobile it is free and what it does is it puts a planetarium right on your
phone we'll use it to find the celestial poll which I'll explain a bit later the second app
is nightcap camera this one costs 2.99 at the time of recording and if you're all interested
in astrophotography on the iPhone nightcap camera I think is the one app to get we can
create basic star Trails images with just this app but it's also going to do a bunch of other stuff
the third app is star stacker it costs 3.99 it is optional it's only needed for the complex
workflow that I'll go through but I do recommend it because it gives us more control when creating
the star Trails images and it also gives us that option to turn our star Trails into a Time
Lapse video which I just think is really cool the fourth and final app is Snapseed this app
is free and it's my personal favorite app for editing astrophotography or any other kind of
photography on a phone with it we can control things like the contrast and saturation in our
photo very easily and this will allow us to put our final touches to taste on the photo
okay with all of those apps downloaded the next step is to get outside on a clear moonless night
and the final result is going to be better the darker your sky is so if you know of a
park or even just a country road where it gets really dark that's ideal I'm now going to show
you how to capture the star trails and I am filming this during the day so that you can
clearly see what I'm doing but of course when you really do this you'll want to do it at night
okay the first step is to open stellarium and when you hold it up and move the phone around
you'll see you can see what stars are visible in whichever direction your phone is pointed and
for your first star Trails project I suggest that we point at the celestial pole all the
stars in the sky appear to move around this point because it's the axis of rotation for
our Earth and that is what star trails are the Visual Evidence of the rotation of the earth so
to find the celestial pole in the night sky in the northern hemisphere it's quite easy you can
just click uh the search up here at the top type in Polaris which is a bright star very
close to the northern Celestial pole and then you just follow the arrow until you are lined
up with Polaris it's at the end of the Little Dipper in the southern hemisphere there is no
bright star close by unfortunately but you do have a constellation that is close to the pole called
octans so you can type in octan's o-c-t-a-n-s and it will point you in the right direction
so now we have to set up the iPhone so that it's pointing physically at the celestial pole and will
stay put so you're just going to take your tripod here and I'm going to do mine horizontal rather
than a vertical photo for me I think it looks better that way but of course it's up to you
you might feel differently you're just going to put the phone into the clamp like that make sure
it's not touching any buttons and just make sure it's nice and stable and then you're just going to
point it up at the stars and lock it all down point it at the celestial Pole
next we'll open up night cap camera app and I'm going to show you the capture part in two
different ways this first way is easier but the results are not quite as good but they're still
excellent and we also can't turn this first method into a video the other advantage to
this method the simple method is it doesn't take up a lot of space on your phone we're just going
to end up with one star Trails picture in the end so if you want an easy method go for this
one it's still very satisfying believe me but for people that are willing to spend the four
dollars on the star stacker app and also are okay with a bit more complexity stay tuned because in
just a couple minutes we'll get to the more complex way to do this but first the easy
way with the easy way all you have to do is open nightcap camera tap this star icon in the lower
corner and turn on Star Trails mode you then will just tap on the screen where the stars
are where the night sky is and allow night cap to automatically set the focus and exposure level and
when it's focused you should see little pinpoints of light like this and it'll lock the focus there
so you don't have to worry about it and then just press the shutter button right here it will count
down and then turn solid red that's on you know it started and then all you have to do is just
watch the star Trails image will be created live right on screen just make sure not to bump the
tripod and I would suggest waiting at least 30 minutes this is what it'll look like after 30
minutes but an hour would be even better to get longer Trails when you're done just press the red
button to stop and that's it exactly what you saw on screen will be saved as a photo on your phone
okay next I'm going to go into the complex method but if you're not interested in that
and just want to skip to the editing portion with Snapseed you can hover over the video and
there will be chapters allowing you to easily skip ahead to that part so I'm going to show you this
more complex method next but before I do I want to share a bit about this video's sponsor skillshare
skillshare is where I go when I want to learn some new skill or some new piece of software right now
one of my goals is to learn blender and so the reason is I want to make these 3D fly-throughs
of astrophotography I had an old workflow using Photoshop and after effects that I think can be
made much better if I actually learn 3D software so I've been sampling the different blender
courses on skillshare and one thing I like is that there are several different instructors so you can
find one that gels with your learning style I'm currently taking your first day in blender 3D
by Southern shoddy3d and learning a lot about how to get around in blender learning how the toolbar
works and how the different layouts work in the timeline and all this different stuff that I need
to know so if you'd like to try skillshare I have a special offer just for you the first 1000 people
to use the link in this description will get a one month free trial of skillshare okay in the more
complex method instead of being in Star Trails mode we want to change that to Stars mode and
then we want to tell it to turn on the Interval Timer so that's in this gear icon right here
we want to turn on the interval programmer and this both both of these right here make
sure this is set to five seconds we want this one set to take photos for Infinity exposure should
be set to five seconds and if you want to do a countdown to start you can set that right there
okay and then the only other choice in here is we want to choose Tiff high quality jpeg or JPEG and
this depends on how much storage space you have on your phone and how much you want to use up because
this method is going to take lots of individual photos you know hundreds and so I have lots of
room on my phone so I'm going to choose Tiff but if you didn't have much room on your phone you
could choose jpeg okay then we can close the settings by just tapping the gear icon again
and now we're going to set focus and exposure by just tapping on the sky
and wait for it to find the stars and focus on them and now we're all ready to go so we can
just go ahead and click the shutter button and it will count down and then start taking pictures and
we ideally want to let this go for at least an hour the longer the better if you are worried
about battery life leaving your phone out in the cold that long you can hook up a
power bank ahead of time when it's all done we are going to open the star stacker app
and the way this one works is you're going to start by tapping on this little
pictures icon in the upper left this lets you pick your pictures
so uh the this is a little tricky but what you want to do is just sort of drag your finger over
the pictures like this and then drag down faster and it'll allow you to pick lots of pictures at
once so I'm just going to keep dragging down until we have all of these pictures
of the stars selected this will take a little while because we took several hundred pictures
this is another advantage of this method if you've made a mistake in any of your
pictures like I did here with this one you can see I had my red light on in
front of the camera which is a mistake and I don't want to include that in the final
stack all I have to do is unselect it and not pick that one and then I can continue
selecting more pictures after that so that's another advantage of the
flexibility of this method is if anything they
don't like happens while capturing you can just unselect those pictures
okay there we go I'm done I've selected all my pictures I took 1912 pictures of
the stars all in a row it took a few hours to collect that many then I'm going to click add
okay up at the top it says checking this will take a while since we're
using so many pictures we'll just give it some time let it do its thing
and then it says ready for stacking so to actually stack the pictures what we want to do is click up
on this stacking icon this has all the options for stacking and I'm just going to do Trail
Style full I'm going to do the full resolution I'm going to turn warp mode off and I'll click Start
and then this will take a while with this many pictures
um you know it it depends on both the number of pictures that you 've put in and the speed of your
iPhone I guess but you can see mine here is going in real time right now and it's saying two three
four so it'll take a few minutes to stack them all but um just like what we were seeing in nightcap
camera a fun thing about the stacking process here in this app is you could watch it stack live and
it gives you a live update of what it's doing but I'm going to speed this part of the video up
okay so we went through stacking just a picture but now let me show you what to do if you want
to create the video because this app does have a limitation and that it doesn't seem to like
to select for you to select too many images when you're making a video so I'm just going to select
the first 200 here
and I'm going to turn the video on to Stacked leave all the rest of the stuff alone click Start
okay and then we can click the export button and choose movie and if it worked you should see this
save video option right down here if it gave a corrupted file you won't see that saved video
option so then just try fewer input images but I found 200 is safe so I'm going to click save image
and now if I look at my videos I can see there it is now if I wanted to do a longer animation
than this a longer time lapse what I could do is just uh delete those first 200 images
select the next 200 and make another video and then with all of and then just keep going like
that in batches and string them together in iMovie which is free on your iPhone
and if that sounds too annoying yet another way to make the animated time lapse video is just to
make a screen recording of your iPhone as the star stacker app is doing this a stacking
of all 1900 photos that I took and then what I can do since I have this screen recording
is just click edit on the screen recording
and crop down the video to just that portion right there
portion of the screen done
and then you have and then you can trim the video down to just the part where
it's going and you have a finished uh time lapse video it'll be a little bit low resolution but
perfectly good for a phone so or sharing on social media so that's an even easier way to
make the time lapse okay and then the last step in creating our star Trails image is
editing and we're going to use Snapseed to do this so simply open Snapseed click open
from device and pick your image there we go then click down here to tools
and choose tune image the very first option and then you can see that top one up there right now
says brightness so if I go left or right it turns up and down the brightness I'm going to leave
brightness alone but I'm going to take my finger and scroll up and if I scroll up I can see all the
different options here in tune image so I'm just pushing my finger up and down on the screen to get
to different options I'm going to go to saturation and I'm going to bring saturation way up now I
could bring it all the way up to 100 I think that looks pretty cool to see the different star colors
but I'm going to do something a little bit more um understated and do maybe plus 50 or Plus 60.
okay and you can play around with some of these other ones Ambience and highlights and so forth to
Bell through the image to your taste now I think it already did a pretty good job with
the star the natural star colors so I wouldn't necessarily want to mess around with warmth
unless you were going for just a fantasy image but if you actually want to see the natural star
colors don't mess around too much with the color temperature just mess around with saturation
and contrast and things like that all right I think that looks good so I'm going to hit
actually let me show you one more thing if you just um tap and hold you can see
before and then if you let go it shows you the after so it's sort of a subtle
change but I think it looks really nice like that so I'm going to go ahead and click this
little check mark down in the lower right hand corner and then click export and Export a copy
so now if I look in my photos there's my final star Trails image which I think looks really good
well I hope this star Trails tutorial was helpful and I hope to make ones like this
for Android phones and maybe DSLR users in the future so let me know in the comments if
you have any questions till next time this is Nico Carver nebula photos clear skies