Star Trail - what are these?

WelshNoob

WelshNoob

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Did my first star trail last night. Literally just outside the back door as a test shot.

This is the whole shot

8MinuteExposure-StarTrails.jpg


And this is a crop

crop.jpg


What are the Red, Blue and Grey blobs around the stars? My camera? Or should they be there?

Thanks in advance.
 
Noise? Dirt? Must be fixed relative to the camera and only being on a clump of pixels.
 
plane fly over head and the camera picking up the red lights flashing?
 
They are pretty much everywhere though, not just in the cropped portion.
 
not sure then, maybe more than one plane:lol:

I never have done a star trail shot, but whilst looking through flickr for pictures taken with a lens I was considering buying and there was a similar photo, but they were similar, but more in a straight line
 
Don't know your location but I'd say these are (flashing red) lights from planes. I'd also guess the flight paths are diagonal - top left to bottom right. You'd be surprised just how many planes are in the night sky - especially about London/Birmingham/Manchester. Where are you?

Check out the bright patches of the wall in the bottom left of your shot to see if you can find any more red lights. Then you'll know if it's a camera issue or not.;)
 
Hot, Cold and Dead pixels :( but virtually every sensor will have them even brand new cameras though not many one would hope, when you consider that your sensor is made up of several million pixels it inevitable to have the odd defective one :( this will not show up under most situations however on long exposures they will become apparent :thumbs:
 
This was an 8 minute exposure. I live in North Wales but it is on the way to Manchester and Liverpool airports for a number of flights.
 
If it was aeroplane lights then there would be intermittent streaks across the frame with an exposure of that length.
 
WelshNoob said:
This was an 8 minute exposure. I live in North Wales but it is on the way to Manchester and Liverpool airports for a number of flights.
Click to expand...

it's not flights, at least I'm 99.99999% certain it's not, as I said above it's defective pixels ;)
 
FourRingCircus said:
Check out the bright patches of the wall in the bottom left of your shot to see if you can find any more red lights
Click to expand...

Some :( Not as many but still quite a few of the grey ones :(

Looks like defective pixels it is then.

Will I damage the camera if I do some more long exposures?
 
Not consistent enough to be airplane lights. I agree with the hot pixel diagnosis, especially as it was an 8 minute exposure which will exacerbate any hot pixel problem.
 
I get these with exposures of over a minute with my 50D. I think they are a result of the sensor getting "warm". I wouldn't worry about them. Maybe a better way of doing startrails is to take multiple exposures and stack them using this:
http://startrails.de/html/software.html

It's free and works well!
 
RJL2005 said:
I get these with exposures of over a minute with my 50D. I think they are a result of the sensor getting "warm". I wouldn't worry about them. Maybe a better way of doing startrails is to take multiple exposures and stack them using this:
http://startrails.de/html/software.html

It's free and works well!
Click to expand...

Personally I wouldn't use that software even the new version of it is not as good as StarStaX which is also a nice bit of freeware and with the added bonus that it is cross platform and can be used on Mac and Linux as well as Windows where as Startrails in still a windows only program
 
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