Star Trails of Orion

Tonight I took the garbage out and I was struck by the clear skies and calm air. Unfortunately, the trade-off was that it was brutally cold, somewhere in the mid twenties Fahrenheit.

I decided not to take the telescope out but instead to try some long exposure photography with only the camera. I've taken star trails around the north star a few times, but I wanted to try one with all the bright stars around the Orion constellation.

I don't have a remote shutter so I used my highly scientific method of duct taping down the shutter button, hasn't failed me yet. I let the camera go for a little over an hour.

I'm quite pleased with how this turned out. I really like the effect of the lens warping at each corner of the image. Thankfully all the airplanes appeared to be kind enough to send least fly in the same direction as the stars so they aren't as noticeable.

Incredibly the bright purple streak isn't actually a star, but the Orion nebula. I like that I was able to pull out some color in the stars, though I'm not quite good enough at editing yet to really make it look right.

The coloring in the bottom right of the image got a but messed up during editing, I'm going to have to practice a bit more with masking. Cropping helps, but that's kind of a cheat.

My camera was set to ISO 250 and a shutter speed of 30 seconds. I combined all 147 these exposures in StarStax to create the trails. Editing was done in darktable and a little on my phone.

I did have a few interesting frames from when I was setting up the camera and dialing in my exposure. It's like this pilot realized I was about to do a long exposure!