[Grimmeister (Anthony)]

Hi Everyone,

A bit of a general question; I was taking some images on the Canon 600D with the 18-55 mm Lens for some star trails. While I got "a" result for my test I was wondering if anyone could chime in with some advice? as I have seen some killer star trail shots and would liek to work towards this level.

I took the exposures and saved them as RAW on the camera, by the time I converted these to TIFs for processing in Star Trails each frame was 100Mb in size and took ages to process. Would I see any real difference if I just take the images as Large JPegs on the camera and process direct into Star Trails without any conversion??? I know I lose some quality with JPeg compression but would be alot easier to process.

Also when I took the images there were some tree's in the foreground, once these were layered together I found the tree's had a type of gradient to them despite them not moving much during exposure is this normal for objects in the foregroud to do this when processed??? as it makes it look really rubbish? I suspect I may need to overlay one frames exposure back over the final star trails output to remove this but there may be an easier way???

Lastly I found the star trails looked more like dotted lines rather than a streak. I suspect again this is due to the pause between frames can anyone confirm and suggest a good setting?

Thanks in advance.

Anthony