Star trails tips: How to shoot a circular star trail image from start to finish

posted Wednesday, November 15, 2017 at 11:35 AM EDT

Star trails are a very fun, but challenging, discipline of astrophotography. There are a lot of considerations from planning and setting up your equipment to editing your final star trails image. To help you learn the ropes, NatureTTL has created a new tutorial video with photographer Matthew Saville.

In the video below, Saville is focused specifically on circular star trails. With winter coming in the northern hemisphere, it's a great time to shoot star trails due to the colder temperatures and the Milky Way no longer being as visible in the sky. Make sure you turn off in-camera noise reduction, as you don't want your camera to be shooting black frames for a star trail, otherwise you'll have gaps in your trails when you stack your images. Another great tip Saville offers is to shoot at a very high ISO when composing your shot and choosing your camera settings. You don't want to do long test exposures as those waste time, so you can dial in your histogram and then use math to figure out the right exposure time for your desired ISO and aperture. For example, if you like the look of a one second exposure at ISO 6400, to achieve the same brightness at ISO 100, you would shoot a one minute exposure. To see more star trails tips, watch the NatureTTL video below.