My cleanest 360° star trail so far
The night sky was very clear yesterday, with just enough auroral activity to make the scene more interesting, and I reworked the post-processing script to remove almost all the quantization noise and light pollution from the final mage.
https://giraut.github.io/360_night_photography/star_trail-17.10.2026.htmlOpen linkView original on piefed.social
4 replies
Does your post processing script also remove satellites, or just not many in the area you're in?
Great shot!
Thanks!
The camera isn't really good a night photography to begin with. I'm sort of pushing the envelope of what it can do. So it doesn't really pick up satellites unless they're really bright. And yeah, there aren't very many here: we're quite high up north.
It does pick up the navigation lights from airliners though. You can see them in Saturday's star trail (to the east):
)
But here's the thing: there are no flights going over my place on Sundays. So provided I get a clear night sky on a Sunday, the star trail should be free of aircraft trails. And that was the case yesterday 🙂
Very nice! Great that you have a consistent day with no interference above. The few times I've attempted star trails they've been littered with satellites and other light pollution, but have always been near-ish a larger city.
Northern Lights reflecting on the water look fantastic in all your shots.
Thanks!
Yes, star trails are harder to pull off than they seem. You have to live somewhere with a sky that's free of artificial object and dark enough - or, like here, wait for the weekend - and the weather must cooperate for a full night. Ideally you need a moonless night too, and if you live up north like I do, half of the year is out because the sun doesn't set. It can be difficult to line up all the requirements.
And in the case of 360 material, you have to contend with image distortion due to the stitching process.
For example, if you look at one of my earlier attempt, if you look up and on the left, you'll see the distortion at the stitch line. To compensate for this, I had to build an equatorial mount, to position the top lens pointing at Polaris and place the stitch line's plane parallel to the equator., where the problem is almost invisible. Plus, the trails in that shot is full of holes because I hadn't quite worked out how to stabilize the timing for the camera's intervalometer script.
So yeah, not easy 🙂
And yes, mirror lakes are great. We get it often here. In the summer, there's nothing quite like getting the boat out on the water in the middle of the night in the midnight sun: you feel like you're suspended in space between two skies.