Star Trails 2020 (so far)

I made a short video. Enjoy! (Nerds: There are a bunch of details below.)

The nerdy details

I went out to var­i­ous places¹ over the last few months to take pho­tos for star-trail com­po­si­tions. Most­ly I shoot with my 11–16mm lens at f/2.8, focused at infin­i­ty. I use Gimp and the Star Trails Com­pos­i­tor plu­g­in to make the actu­al trails.

One option when using the com­pos­i­tor plu­g­in is to save the inter­me­di­ate files in a direc­to­ry. I like to do this, because it’ll let me go back, lat­er, and make a time-lapse video of the trails as they grow. (I use a com­mand-line pro­gram called mencoder to make my time­laps­es, generally.)

I real­ized the oth­er day: hey, I’ve got all these inter­me­di­ate files, I could make a sin­gle video of all the star trails I’ve done this year.

And so I did.

---

¹ Loca­tions and dates:

• Feb. 28, 2020, fac­ing south, near Souris, MB
• Mar. 28, 2020, north­west of Bran­don, MB, just off Hwy. 270
• Jul. 23, 2020, at the cab­in, Minnedosa, MB (the blue clip)
• Aug. 11, 2020, west of Bran­don, just off Hwy. 1
• Sep. 18 and 19, 2020, Image Hill, between Mac­Gre­gor and Bagot, MB (two clips)

Watch for mete­ors! They appear in a few of the clips (the last one has three at least, down in the low­er-left quadrant).

Unless oth­er­wise spec­i­fied, the pho­tos are tak­en fac­ing most­ly northward.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.