Polar Startrails. 4 July 2012 00:29, Gonneville, 50560, Manche.

[The Thing]

Polar Startrails. 4 July 2012 00:29, Gonneville, 50560, Manche. 200 x 60s. Canon 1000Da with 50mm Pentax lens at f4, no filters.
Gaps at the end of the trails are clouds obscuring the stars. There is an Iridium flare and several planes and satellites.

Click image for 1/2 sized version

[Carole]

Wow, that's impressive.

Carole

[The Thing]

Thanks Carole.

BTW the Iridium flare is the bright dot on the far left middle (shows much better on the individual sub) and alignment was a bit of trial and error. FoV is 20 x 24 degrees.

[MarkH]

Excellent Duncan it kind of resembles the view out of a sweet shop window at night.

[Carole]

I feel like I am falling into a vortex with a black hole at the bottom.

Carole

[MarkS]

Really nice!!

[JohnP]

Excellent Duncan - Thats come out really well - shows star colours really nicely. Only comment would background needs cleaning a little (hot/ rogue pixels etc.) but other than that top notch. I've never managed to get an image like this & its definitely on my todo list.

John

[The Thing]

Thanks John.

This was a first cut process using Startrails. I set it to create an averaged background from 5 frames but it seems to have retained some stars in the background. I didn't use darks as the subs were only 10 seconds. A lot of the hot pixels are airplane trails and there is a satellite track and the Iridium flare. I should really have left those subs out - Startrails (updated recentlyish) has an option to fill in the gaps. I didn't do any cleaning up of the final image, a bit of gamma tweaking makes it really psychadelic! Always room for improvement!

[Mike]

Really nice Duncan. Only criticism from me is that a lot of the stars look pink to me.

[The Thing]

I could post a re-process or three... 

[Mike]

Oh you know how much we all love re-processes.

[Fay]

Really nice startrails Duncan

[The Thing]

Thanks Fay.