Star trails

[claudiu182]

Hello there. I've got a hard one.

Any ideea how to shoot night sky light trail photos with a sony alpha a6000 without using the app?

Sony tells me that I can't buy the app in my country. Thanks a million!

[Ben]

You could take many shots and combine it with Software like starstax http://www.markus-enzweiler.de/software/software.html.

 

Since I do not want to spend money on an intervalometer what I did on my Sony RX100II was use a rubber band and a little knob to constantly push the shutter release and have the camera in continuous mode. I do all my timelapses that way.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Ben

[Ben]

This is one example I made with this "poor man's" approach

 

[Austerror]

Indeed there are ways to do it manually without in camera software.

 

The longer the lens, the faster the star trails appear. Shoot in manual mode... There is a lot of information on the internet. Have a read and you will learn loads of stuff.

[dd_san]

I manage to buy the StarTrail app (and others) using this tutorial: http://www.alinpopescu.eu/blog/cum-instalezi-aplicatii-playmemories-pe-aparatele-foto-sony/

[TRON]

The new moon is coming this Tuesday and I will be attempting my first star trail shot with a6000 (or any camera for that matter) and have been reading up on the topic.  First, find a very dark location far away from city and artificial lights. You'll need a sturdy tripod and a remote shutter release.  I've been told an effective method is to set your camera to continuous shooting, manual focus, and an ISO of 800 to 1600, shooting at 30 second intervals for several hours.  Because of that, I'd also bring another battery and a suitable cloth to wipe your lens in case condensation begins to build.  I hear Star Stax is a great free software to blend your images, which also includes an option to "fill the gaps" in your trails.  Apparently, including a black shot taken with your lens cap on can help reduce noise in the Star Stax processing.  I hope this helps.  

 

Also, I have a few questions for the pros.  What ISO settings would you recommend?  I'm wary of using 800 to 1600 because of the amount of images stacked on top of each other which may result in a lot of noise. Also, I plan on using my 50mm F1.8 lens because it's my fastest lens, but doubt I'll be able to get an interesting foreground and also capture the North Star at such a high focal length.  My other options are my kit lens and my super wide 10-18mm F4 which are wide enough, but are they fast enough to produce quality results?  Also, I'd love to hear any tips on processing these images prior to processing in Star Stax for optimal results.  Thanks and good luck!  

[Ben]

What ISO settings would you recommend? I'm wary of using 800 to 1600 because of the amount of images stacked on top of each other which may result in a lot of noise.

Hi TRON,

 

not a pro but I guess I can give some experience based advice. In general stacking reduces the amount of noise as the layer method ( be it mean, median or some other fancy sigma-kappa) averages the the noise and brings out more accurate colors. In the case of stacking for star streaks the layering method might not be the best to reduce noise(most manual tutorials for star trails use "lighten" in photoshop), but it still reduces noise significantly. Another way to reduce noise is to chose a smart white clipping of your exposure in camera. In other words expose to the right and do not try to maintain highlights data of the star cores. This might look like an overexposed picture straight ooc, but in return you do not waste dynamic range on the stars that are too small to hold any detail anyway. Before stacking you need to pull the exposure down and emphasize the parts of the image that hold the interesting data.

The benefit is that you are able to catch more data of the nebulosity and fainter aspects of the night sky.

 

Lens-wise I would go for ultra wide when aiming for a landscape shot. I am not too concerned about lens speed when I want to get one single picture out of all those frames. I would be concernced when doing a night sky timelapse. If you want to do a single frame star trail picture with a bulb exposure of more than 30s a longer focal length will give you trails in shorter time. So it kind of depends on what you want to do. Ian Norman from http://www.lonelyspeck.com has very good articles on landscape astrophotography and widefield astrophotography. Many good tutorials on how to process and how to tweak the final results.

 

I often try to shoot my exposures in a multipurpose way, so that I can salvage a timelapse from all frames, stack them with trails or try to stack them aligned for best image quality.

Video:

combined stills: http://www.qpic.ws/images/stacked02edit.jpg

http://www.qpic.ws/images/multiframeaja.jpg

 

Hope this helps. Regards,

 

Ben

[TRON]

Ben, 

 

Thanks so much for the detailed response and impressive images!  Lonely Speck is a great resource and love the idea of stacking exposures and plan to give it a try this week.  I don't own a panorama head on my tri pod, so I will be adjusting overlapping the exposures by 50% manually while trying to keep the horizon as level as possible.  I'd be interested to hear what method you use for salvaging a timelapse from your stills. 

 

Cheers, 

 

Ryan

[TRON]

Also, I found Dave Morrow to be a great resource for astro and landscape photography.  I've included the link to his star trail video below:

 

[Ben]

Ben, 

 

Thanks so much for the detailed response and impressive images!  Lonely Speck is a great resource and love the idea of stacking exposures and plan to give it a try this week.  I don't own a panorama head on my tri pod, so I will be adjusting overlapping the exposures by 50% manually while trying to keep the horizon as level as possible.  I'd be interested to hear what method you use for salvaging a timelapse from your stills. 

 

Cheers, 

 

Ryan

 

During the shooting I try to figure out what static manual settings will work over the whole time that I will be taking frames. I try to keep the time between exposures as short as possible - either by using continuous drive mode on my rx100 or by choosing interval only half a second longer than exposure time on the lend Nikon D610. This makes the result look more fluent and gives a more cinematic look imho.

Usually my post processing workflow is to go through the raw files in Lightroom and edit the first of all frames until I like it. Then I sync all settings for all frames and look at the last frame of the series. If white balance or general exposure is off by too much, I will try to find a compromise that I can sync again to all frames. I check if it works for the majority of frames in the library module, as this allows for faster scrolling through the set of frames. Then I export it as full size jpeg files and import it as an image sequence in Premiere with a 4k project at strict 24 fps. In premiere you can do things like panning by moving the crop (the aspect ratio mismatch of 3:2 compared to 16:9 allows for vertical panning without any loss of quality or horizontal panning when cropped in tighter as would be needed)in order to give some fake paralax effect. 

This timelapse workflow might be less flexible than other workflows (like "holy grail" techniques with variable exposure times) but it gets rid of micro exposure changes pretty much all the time.

I haven't looked into star trail timelapses yet - cannot say much about this.

 

Here you can see some crop-panning: https://youtu.be/qqoNIMaOyVY

It won't look like a motorized timelapse dolly shot but it makes footage more dynamic.

 

Cheers, 

 

Ben

[Ben]

Scouted a new location and had a blast until fog came up

 

https://youtu.be/ipT2WYQZLOA

 

http://www.qpic.ws/images/imagejglg.jpg