This gallery is the collection of 9 years of long nights shooting 2-6 hours in various locations around the United States.
Startrails
A “startrail” is a type of photograph that uses long exposure times to capture diurnal circles, the apparent motion of stars in the night sky due to Earth’s rotation. A star-trail photograph shows individual stars as streaks across the image, with longer exposures yielding longer arcs. The term is used for similar photos captured elsewhere, such as on board the International Space Station and on Mars.
Typical shutter speeds for a star trail range from 15 minutes to several hours, requiring a “Bulb” setting on the camera to open the shutter for a period longer than usual. However, a more practiced technique is to blend a number of frames together to create the final star trail image. To learn more about star trails, here is the Wikipedia page.
These are formally composite images because I join 1 more images together in a “stack”. The “stack” is a group of images on separate layers in a photo editing program. When certain settings are selected, the objects that are stationary are combined, but the objects that changed position in the frame will have all their movements appear together in the compressed image.
