Startrails 2013
Velké Karlovice is a beautiful recreation area with exceptionally dark skies. So I took advantage of the holiday and the moonless night to attempt my first star trail photo.
Star trail photography is technically undemanding at first glance and captures the apparent movement of stars in the sky. However, on the first night, the camera fogged up after an hour of shooting. Since I only went light (as far as astronomical equipment goes) on vacation, I didn't have a dew heater or dew shield. The next day I photographed directly from the windowsill of the cottage. Fixing it was difficult, but thanks to the help of my wife, it was done. The whole family then slept with the window panes removed to the regular clicking of the shutter and the hum of the laptop. The only one who traditionally didn't sleep was me :-)
In the photo you can clearly see that even Polaris does not lie exactly on the north celestial pole.
The resulting photo is a composition of 240 images of 120 seconds each at ISO 800. All flat, bias and dark images were calibrated in the MRAW program, composited in the Startrails program and then edited in Photoshop. The most challenging was adjusting the forest in the foreground, which was very noisy in the composite image.