You’ll also need a wide-angle lens that can ideally deliver a fairly wide aperture. A good sturdy tripod is essential – something that won’t move as you’re making images. When it comes to photographic equipment, there are rather specific requirements. You’ll need to photograph for a few hours in order to get long enough trails to fill the night sky, so make sure you take plenty of warm clothing, food, and water with you.
Moonlight is useful to light up the surrounding landscape, though you’ll want to make sure you don’t have the moon itself in the frame, since this is much too bright for the long exposures we’ll be using. You’ll need dark skies away from light pollution (Blue Marble’s night map can help you here), and very little cloud coverage. The conditions have to be just right for a star trail photograph to work. This type of astrophotography is quite technical, but not as difficult as you might first think once you’ve had time to digest and practice the techniques involved. The principle is the same as we would use for traffic trails, only on a much longer timescale to reflect the relatively slower movement of the stars, caused by the rotation of the Earth.
Framing this on camera can be a very satisfying technical challenge.Ĭreating star trails requires a long shutter speed to turn stars into streaks of light as they move across the night sky. There are few things as spectacular in photography as a star trail – the cosmos smeared across the night sky as the Earth rotates on its axis. Our tips on technique and gear are what you need to do it well
Framing the cosmos in the night sky is a challenge few photographers can ignore.
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