Use freeware to create star trail images

How to turn your frames into beautiful star trail photos in a few clicks

Star trails images are a very rewarding type of nightscape photography. Capturing the movement of the stars as Earth rotates on its axis is beautiful in itself, but when it incorporates a nice foreground it really elevates the shot. The great thing about star trail photographs is that they're very easy to produce and can be done with very basic camera equipment.

In addition to shooting images with the intention of creating star trails, you can also create them from photographs taken during other imaging sessions. For example, if you've been photographing a meteor shower, aurora display or even a noctilucent cloud display, as long as your camera was on a static tripod and has not been nudged, you can take the images and create a star trail photograph with them. This means that even if you don't capture many meteors or your aurora alert resulted in a no-show, you'll still get a lovely image from the data.

There are several free pieces of software available that will create star trails, but in this example we are using Sequator (sites.google.com/view/ sequator). The software is free, easy to use, it stacks very quickly and it also has several useful features that can be applied to the output image during the stacking process, reducing the need for further image processing.

A few simple steps