You know what? That looks pretty darn cool. I really like how you've got the pole towards the pole of the sphere itself. Reminds me of the droplets that would appear in LightWave 3D for when you wanted to create texture maps for your models. The trails themselves form the lines of lattitude. Very cool!
I've never tried fixing gaps betwen star trails (I have one I'm working on at the moment). I'd imagine you'd need to find the centre of rotation and rotate the image around that point. But, then, you run the risk of screwing up the trails that are further out in the image as they often curve due to lens curvature.
How long was the gap between exposures?
My understanding is if you wish to have no gaps, then, you need to allow at maximum 700/focal_length as a rest between images.
I've got a real rough recent result of the SCP.
I will try and dig it out. Edit: posted
I had an 18-55mm DSLR lens at 18mm and used 30sec exposures
but only 10 sec apart.
This , when stacked with no registration(ie straight stack on stack)
gave nil gaps....
Steve
I took about 50 two minute shots but only had about 3 seconds gap between shots. I have overdone it with the colours but you can only see the gaps if you zoom in. I used the program star trails.
Actually Fred, it is still there on mine.
A 1x1 view of a crop shows gaps.
The resized down for full screen viewing artificially joins the gaps.
Steve
Hi Steve, Fred
"Dust & Scratches" filter Photoshop cleans up those gaps reasonably well without destroying the image too much. The gaps on Fred's original image are a little too wide for the filter to do a decent job.
On the attached image I used Radius: 2, Threshold: 12
Actually Fred, it is still there on mine.
A 1x1 view of a crop shows gaps.
The resized down for full screen viewing artificially joins the gaps.
Steve
Yes, the dimmer trails are solid, anyway the joined gaps look OK there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by batema
Fred,
I took about 50 two minute shots but only had about 3 seconds gap between shots. I have overdone it with the colours but you can only see the gaps if you zoom in. I used the program star trails.
Mark
Thats nice Mark, smooth, the trail colours are good too. I didnt know there was a program just for trails. I had much longer than 3 sec gaps, but then the subs were only 30 secs, too short, which became a problem trying to stretch them all for a video sequence, still working on that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alexch
Hi Steve, Fred
"Dust & Scratches" filter Photoshop cleans up those gaps reasonably well without destroying the image too much. The gaps on Fred's original image are a little too wide for the filter to do a decent job.
On the attached image I used Radius: 2, Threshold: 12
good to see what you ended up with after all that stuffing around with cold batteries eh! i think you could make it better if you removed the one odd exposure at the start (or is it the end?). the regular sequenced images would then look alright..
even when i use 'continuous shooting' mode on the camera so that it is rolling from one frame to the next as fast as it can, i still get (small) gaps in my widefield star trails (which surprised me). i used to try and get a star trail and a timelapse out of the one sequence of images, but have given up and now i go either for either the timelapse (short exposures, high iso) or for a star trail (single long exposure, low iso). having the aperture wide open and high iso for the timelapse also burns out the stars so there's very little colour left. i also still use film for star trails too - no hot pixels and nice natural colour balance in long exposures!
but just think.. you could have got a nice deep widefield shot of the milky way too, if only you had an EQ6
Trevor, yes the other one is even more pronounced cone effect.
Greg, yes a single long exposure was the otherway, but any hick up (stumble) would have wrecked it.
Phil, I know, theres a couple of stray exposures there, but I couldnt be bothered finding it, although it looks like its the 1st one. Ididnt take the exposures as fast as I could, cause I wouldve ended up with hundreds of exposures and even less battery time.
"you could have got a nice deep widefield shot of the milky way too, ", ummm, and why would I want that ;-)
.
