Full Sky Star Trails

It feels like it’s been years since the sky has been clear and snow hasn’t trapped my telescope in the shed, so when the forecast was for a clear moonless night I decided to take a relatively simple photo. I’ve taken star trails before, but I don’t think I’ve ever really done it using my all sky camera.

I set up outside with the ZWO ASI290MC and tried to position the camera so that no house lights were visible in the shot to wash anything out. This was harder to do than I realized and I ended up with some pretty bad glare in the image.

Focus was thankfully close enough, because I forgot to focus the camera! I set the exposure to 20 seconds and picked a gain setting that let me see a lot of stars without blowing out the image.

After leaving the camera out for about an hour I had ~190 images to work with. I combined them all in StarStax to create a star trail image, but realized some very bright airplanes really ruined the effect so I ended up only using about 30 minutes of images to create the photo. The only adjustments I made were some level changes in darktable to darken the backgound sky and make the stars pop a bit more.

There are glares from nearby lights, the focus isn’t quite right, I nearly missed the north star, and there are some horrible JPEG artifacts due to how I saved the individual images.

It won’t win any awards, but it feels good to get back out on a nice night!