Astrophotography - Star Trails

In this task, I was aiming to shoot some star trails during the night and then use this software called StarStaX to merge my images together to have a star trail image. In order to shoot, I had to ensure that I had my camera equipment and camera settings ready to shoot. So I needed the obvious camera, charged battery, SD card, tripod and lens cap strangely. My camera had to be set up on these settings:

ISO: 800

Aperture: f/8

Shutter Speed: 30 Seconds

Drive Mode: Continuous

After shooting, we had to capture an image with our lens cap on so that the software will kill all the dead pixels and noise, and we'd just be left with the star trail.

Here are my contact prints:

This is my first shoot and experience at capturing star trails. As you can see, I started off with an unfocused image then gradually got it focused and perfect. Then suddenly whilst we're shooting, the weather decides to become cloudy so the stars eventually became covered. You can see in each frame the movement of the cloud as it overshadows the stars. This was taken on a Canon 650D so I was hoping to get some results. But unfortunately there wasn't I could do except to shoot again.

This second attempt was taken at my back garden and I was using a sony DSLR this time. It was all going great until I noticed a problem with my camera. The battery was fully charged yet it will die completely after like 15 mins. However, you can see some movement in the stars but I wasn't happy with the issue I was facing with so I couldn't shoot long enough. I had to keep going indoors to charge my camera then starting all over. Here are some of the other attempts:

Out of all the previous shoots, this turned out the best to an extent because there's multiple stars and there's also movement present. Overall it wasn't the best experience and I was hoping to get some good shots from it but I suppose it's been a great learning experience. I also had to change the settings for some of the images from f/8 to f/22 because of all the light pollution around me. That way, it let less light in and the stars were pretty shining. Along with some of the issues I've had with the camera, the weather was a massive issue. I felt like this task wasn't ideal to do with the weather we was facing because we had foggy nights, rainy nights and then cloudy nights. So if I could change anything, I'd ensure that the sky is clear and there's no sign of bad weather that night.