Star Trails Timelapse

Learning how to do star trails timelapse is straight forward but can be time consuming due to the number of different sets. Once you have the final version star trail time lapses look so good.

BASIC EQUIPMENT

Camera with Manual mode – M on the dial so will need to be able to set the ISO and Aperture

Intervalometer – So you can select the interval between shots, number of images to be taken and exposure length e.g. shutter length.

Wide Angle Lens – A lens that can be set to Manual focus. I would say nothing over 35mm. A fast lens but not over f4 or faster e.g f2.8, f1.8. The smaller the number the more light that is let through to the camera

Tripod – a good sturdy tripod so there is no movement

Photo editing software 

1. Photoshop/Lightroom or something like Gimp which is free
2. StarStax (Mac and Windows) – stacking and blending software, which allows to merge a series of photos into a single image
3. LRTimelapse

Here is a link to the gear I use My Gear List

TAKING YOUR TIME LAPSE

• Like with the star trails photography how to guide ideally you need a dark night sky no more than class 4 on the Bortle scale. Of course clear skies because star trails doesn’t work with clouds.
• A good web site to use to find dark skies is light pollution map
• After setting up your gear you will have to focus on the foreground interest. Your foreground interest will be at a distance where focusing at Infinity (∞) will have the foreground in focus.
• To focus at Infinity (∞) use the camera live view e.g. using the screen on the back of the camera. Find a bright star in the sky and with the + button/screen magnifier zoom in as much as you can. Once you have the star in the screen focus the lens until the star becomes round.
• Just to note, there is a good chance that the Infinity symbol (∞) wont line up with the make on the lens. Don’t worry about it, it happens on some lenses.
• ISO, my default ISO setting for star trails is 640. I normally take a couple of test shots and move my ISO up or down to get the best results. One thing to note, the higher the ISO the lower quality the image will become. With high ISO the image will look grainy which doesn’t look good.
  

  Time Lapse Settings

• For my time lapse below my settings where f5, 20 sec shutter and ISO 1600. The reasons for the settings,
  1. f5 – I wanted the Squamish Chief as sharp as I could get.
  2. 20 second shutter, there is a lot of light coming from the town of Squamish so didn’t want to have too bight a foreground.
  3. ISO 1600, after a few test shots this was the best for what I wanted.
  4. Number of images 199

  PHOTO EDITING

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  When editing remember it comes down to personal preference. For example some people like the temp cooler (bluer) and some like the temp warmer (orange/yellow).

  My personal work flow for star trails is to import the photos into Lightroom. Edit one image and then sync settings. Sync settings copies the settings from the first image and updated all the other images.

  As for what to change on the edit such as exposure, highlights, shadows etc is personal preference, but one thing should be done is Lens Correction. Lens Correction fixes such lens problems as distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting and perspective correction.

  Export all the images as .jpg to a new folder called something you will remember.

  StarStax

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  Open the new folder with all your .jpg’s in and either select all and drag and drop or click File > Open Images
  Under Preferences click on Blending

  1. select Blending Mode Lighten
  2. click Save After Each Step
  3. Enter an image name or use the default name
  4. Under Output Folder click browse and create a new folder called something like StarStax Images

  Click Edit > Start Processing
  Once StarStax has finished processing all the images would have been stacked on top of each other, for example image three would should image one,two and three in the one image.

  LRTimelapse

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  Open LRTimelapse and select all the images in the StarStax folder
  Click Render Directly

  1. Codec – MP4
  2. Output Size – 4K UHD
  3. Frame Rate – 25 to 30
  4. Speed 1:1, but if this makes the time lapse a couple of seconds you can slow it down
  5. Quality – Very High

  Click Render Video

  End Result

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  Below is the end result of taking the 199 photos, stacking them in StarStax and creating the time lapse.