Hello my name is Doug Hubbell and welcome to astrophotography tutorials.
Tonight I'm going to show you how to take star trails.
Star Trails you've seen these all before where they show the North Pole and you see the circle
of stars rotating around it.
Well this software "startrails" is very easy to use and it's free and I'm going to show
you how to use it.
The equipment you use for star trails is pretty simple stuff, I have a laptop, I have power
supply, and this power supply gives it continuous power so you can take many more than just
a normal battery life.
I'm using just a Nikon D60 DSLR.
I've got a Nikor 50mm 1.18 lens on it.
And you need a tripod.
Pretty modest equipment most of this stuff people have and you can take decent star trails
with this equipment.
Ok this is the setup right here.
This is the DSLR I have a 50mm lens on the front here, with a dew shield on the front.
And what I'm trying to do with this shot, with the star trails is I'm trying to pick
out something that's going to be static, I chose this top of this yucca plant or whatever
this plant is, it's pretty steady, the trees they blow around in the wind.
I'm going to try to use that as a foreground shot.
I don't know we'll see how that works, and then we should be able to see star trails
in the background.
Just a USB cable, that runs down through there, right to my laptop, and power right here right
to a battery, and a simple tripod.
Many of the cameras have the ability to capture photos in a sequence.
The camera I'm using doesn't have that ability, so I'm using software called Nikon camera
control pro.
Basically I go there here and I setup my setting here and then when I'm ready to take time
lapse photography I just click here and I tell it start taking the shoots.
My particular case I'm taking a 30 second exposures and I have to wait about 55 seconds
for it to download and get the image to the computer.
So you see little dots or spots in my star trails image.
But anyway after you do that just hit the start button.
Ok the first thing you need to do is you need to go to startrails.de and this is where you
can download this software you just simply go to the software button click on that, and
if you scroll down you'll see a download link right here for startrails, just download that
and install it.
The author also accepts donations and I found this software so easy to use I made donation
as well, you might enjoy giving him a small tip as well.
The software once you open it's very easy to use, click right here to open your image
files, and bring up your image files, and then you select all the files you need to
process, say open, and then what you do is you hit the startrails button there, and as
you can see, when you watch it, it starts to magically appear for you, in front of you,
right in front of your eyes.
It's a very neat software, very easy to use, it also has another video option too where
you can actually see the sky moving across the video.
When it gets done here it will kind of average the foreground picture together, and what
I did at the end of the imaging session, is I took my little head lamp and I shined it
over the top of this, the front of this plant here, it brightens it up, and it will automatically
impose that over the top.
Now one of the things you need to look at, when you do this, you can see it's out of
focus, but when I do the last few images that are in focus, the star trails start to become
out of focus.
You see these big blobs right there.
I what I did, what you see right here, I captured this one image, and then I did a second image
without this front part in focus, and I'll show you what processing I did in photoshop
here very quickly.
Here we see the foreground with those little dots and spots that's because this image,
the plant is at a different focal point that the stars are, What I'll do is hit control
A, copy that, control C, and then I'll go over to here.
I'll paste this over the top of this, now this image does not have the front plant in
focus, I'm going to paste that over the top of it, and you can see those ugly blobby stars
right there.
But we can take care of this easily with a layer mask.
I'll go to layer, layer mask, hide all, and I'll get the brush tool out and I'll simply
brush this foreground piece inside here, like that.
And there you go!
You have a nice foreground image and you've got some nice star trails.
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I publish two astrophotography videos on the first and fifteenth of every month.
Thanks for watching and I hope to see you soon!