Monday, April 18, 2016

Beginning With Astrophotography – Star Trails!

- by SIRANJEEVI DAYALAN

For every photographer, capturing daylight images and grabbing every precious frame around boosts up fun. Sometimes, shooting images at night with low light turns out to be a nuisance to you rather than a sweet piece of cake. The dark sky above you at night seems to show very little notable with your naked eye. Contrastingly, there’s not just a whole world, but a whole universe of moments that can be captured by you. It may not be your naked eye, but any basic DSLR can capture the amazing dramatic photos – Welcome to Astrophotography! 


Astrophotograph of a cosmic bubble- Bubble Nebula
As you had just stepped into astrophotography, it grabs a great courage for me to make you understand that you don’t need a space shuttle or a million dollar cash to capture the moments in space. Shuttling thoughts and a presence of mind is far enough to start with the beginner level of Astrophotography. A beginner Astrophotographer kit basically has a DSLR body, a wide lens – preferably 18mm focal length and a tripod. As you are on a 101-course status, the most simple understanding I would expect from you is that the earth keeps rotating on its own axis – this simply implies that your subject is never stationary.
A simple, no expense astrophotograph technique is the star trail. So what is a star trail? Star trail is a technique for capturing the path traced by the stars as the earth rotates on its axes. If you start gazing at stars for longer intervals, you may seem them move across the sky. Stars traverse a circular path of a smaller radius when seen from poles rather when seen from the equator. This is simply due to the shape and size of earth. Stars similar to the sun moves 15° westward each hour relative to earth. Tracing the path traversed by the stars lively with your camera is simply called star trail.
Now let us jump into capturing star trail with your camera!
1. Grab a wide lens – preferably 18mm focal length with a wide aperture (preferably f/3.5 or less)
2. Mount your DSLR onto a tripod and face the lens to the vast and deep sky filled with stars
3. The Manual Setting for star trail you may consider will be
Maintain an ISO of 400 that makes fairly dim stars visible and as well has no significant noise.
Maintain an aperture f/3.5 or less to enable maximum light passage to the camera.
Switch to bulb mode that enables you to capture long exposure shots greater than 30 second shutter time (a recommended ~50 mins for a good star trail).
Focus on infinity using Manual Focus and set the frame.
4. Capture the image of the deep dark star-filled sky with a shutter speed of 50 minutes by using shutter remote and allow post processing.
The trail of star you obtain resembles the below pic. The star trails are nice, curvy arcs or partial circles. The bigger the exposure time, the bigger the arc trails.
Star Trails!
It’s really important for you to understand that capturing a perfect star trail is a challenging task. One significant precaution that gets neglected by most of the beginners is the light noise. While you plan your star trail, make sure you are away from all light sources that can interfere the final image. Have a torch that you can use for placing the camera setup. I suggest you try the android application – Stellarium that can help you in positioning your camera.
So Grab your camera, pick your location, shoot the trails!
Got any questions? Ask us in the comments section below!


This post first appeared here.


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