Star trail spiral over Pakenham

I’m not sure why I didn’t blog about this at the time, but almost two weeks ago we had clear skies in Melbourne so I decided to have another crack at photographing star-trails.

Star trails are created by several long exposure photos, blended together to showcase the movement of the Earth. Once upon a time, star trails would need hours of work in PhotoShop. These days more and more new cameras have this creative feature available “in-camera”, including my Olympus OM-D.

There were a couple of failed attempts at star trails on the night, thanks to poor low-light focus and looking in the wrong direction.  I’ve then used the smart-phone app called SkyVew for iPhone to see the best direction to point my camera.

This picture is the end result, 60 x 60 second exposures (lets call it a one hour exposure), looking South over Pakenham.