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Decided to give Sydney Harbour another try for inner city bound star trails...

Suggestions, comments, critique always appreciated...

Gerry joined me in Bradfield Park just under the northern end of the Harbour bridge for a view which would include the SOH on the left, Sydney CBD in the middle and the SHB on the right with (if our planning turns out vaguely correct) the centre of the rotation of the stars just to the left of the CBD.

The conditions were about as ideal as we were going to get in the city - very nice clear skies (no clouds and little smog, etc), no moon and hopefully some stars. The light pollution was once again a big factor but that was a given, it turned out flare (from the man made lighting which turns on after dark) would also be a big problem but alas not something that could be rectified more than an hour into a multi hour shoot - it's not like you can reframe and get the sun to set again

I started with a new technique this time - put the camera on continuous high set on manual mode at 30 seconds f/4 and ISO 640 and then use the remote trigger with the shutter button held down - the aim was for it to continuously take 30 second frames with no delay between - this worked for the first 100 shots and then just stopped taking any more (some mysterious internal limit I guess). Same thing happened to Gerry (but he has the same camera) - annoyingly this meant that the almost first hours worth of images would likely be discarded. We started our star trails frames again, this time using the intervalometer set to take infinite 30 second frames with 1 second gaps and this time I got 360 usable frames (3 hours of exposures) to stack.

This time I also used the Stacking Action from Star Circle Academy which worked well.

The results of blending the resulting stack with a twilight shot and after some heavy post processing of the washed and blown out stacked trails turned out reasonably good for a first round editing effort...



Thanks Gerry for joining me on what would have been a very lonely evening otherwise...

nice...i have not even taken the images oof the camera yet.

biggerry wrote:nice...i have not even taken the images oof the camera yet.

Since they're out of Focus, you may as well delete them.
They won't compete with this lot. Well done Rodney. I struggle with my relatively dark location.
I vaguely recall reading something about a 100 shot limit in the D7000, but I think it is adjustable. Possibly only down though.

Can't you simply merge the first 100 with the last 300 though?

Nice work, great location and well blended. I did a trial shot of star trails at home last night and am currently trying to blend them.

Mr Darcy wrote:I vaguely recall reading something about a 100 shot limit in the D7000, but I think it is adjustable. Possibly only down though.

The 100 shot limit I vaguely recall as being the number of JPEGs you could shoot in continuous high but I presumed that was the buffer depth at 6fps - Gerry could see the green light on briefly after each frame whilst the next was being taken which we presumed was card writes of the prev image.

Can't you simply merge the first 100 with the last 300 though?

I did stack them and tried merging that stack as well however... there's a gap in the trails - although it's a lot less obvious with this large (30 min) gap so it just looks like a few more trails; the bigger problem was there were some clouds which moved through during those frames and it really messed up the sky

It's quite nice. Love the colours and the movement of the
stars. It gives me the impression we are in tumble dryer.

zafra52 wrote:It gives me the impression we are in tumble dryer.

Oh dear. I'll never look at star trails the same way again.