An Attempt at Star Trails

Over the weekend, I wanted to try and experiement with Star Trail images but I wasn't sure if that would be possible with all the rain we had at the beginning of the weekend. However, at around 5:15am on Sunday morning, the cloud cover broke enough for me to attempt this new project. I only got one image that night, but I do like what I got:

I attempted to try again on Sunday night/early Monday morning, and the first image of the night I took didn't yield any star trails at all. I took a second image and I did get trails, but I think that the image would be a little more interesting if I had a clip of a tree in the image somewhere to give the image more of an anchor.

I hope to test out some more star trail images sometime this week. I would like to see if I can get a darker night sky in the background to really make those star trails pop more. Each of these exposures was about an hour long. 

Here are the previous three images with a little bit of tweaking in Picasa 2: