
If you want a little more flexibility and control without having to resort to tethering to a computer on site, you can purchase an intervalometer. When you lock the shutter down, the camera will just continually fire one 30-second exposure after another until you stop it. Set your camera for an appropriate ISO and lens aperture for a 30-second shot on manual mode, with the shutter set to burst or continuous fire (It looks like three overlapping boxes). The easiest and least expensive way to do this is with a shutter release cable that locks down the shutter. Instead, take many exposures and combine them later into one composite. An intervalometer allows you to program a lengthy series of exposures.Ī star-trail image does require hours of exposure time, but it’s not practical to make a single exposure that lasts that long. What’s more, the lens does not have to be particularly fast some aberrations out at the edges of the frame will have little effect on your final image. A wide-angle lens works best, but even a standard kit lens will capture a large swath of sky. All you need is a tripod (no tracking required - or wanted), a camera, and an inexpensive shutter release cable. What’s more, the equipment needed to create star trails is rudimentary. (You do have to travel though!) Creative star trail images require astonishingly little equipment to pull off. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader, but with some basic geometry, you can even use star trails to demonstrate that Earth is round, just like the ancient Greeks did. However, for wide-field nightscapes, star trails can be very beautiful, and they illustrate well Earth's rotation. Normally, trailing stars are a problem and diagnosing them is the bane of amateur and professional astronomers alike.
#Startrail greece how to#
Star trail images are a great and fun introduction to nightscape photography, and they're actually pretty easy to do.Īstrophotographers spend a lot of time figuring out how to accurately and smoothly track our targets in the sky for long exposures.
