Star Trails at Devil's Garden

Star Trails at Devil's Garden, originally uploaded by BillyCrafton.

One of the plans for visiting Devil's Garden was to try our hand at Star Trails thanks to a website Terry Watson discovered.

Using a photoshop action located here: http://www.schursastrophotography.com/software/photoshop/startrails.html

You run a batch operation on the folder that holds the star trail images and it opens them 1 at a time and combines the pictures.
It looks like it takes the first picture and uses that and then adds the stars before it flattens the layer.

In our test, we setup under the arch at Devil's Garden and I played with Manual Exposure until I got the results that I wanted, using a 30s exposure. From there, I locked my remote release to force the camera to fire every 30s or so. I shot at ISO 200 and used my Sigma 10-20mm lens since I didn't need a fast f/2.8 lens for this shot.

While we were taking the shots, we were frequently buzzed by bats as the insects came out. We also had a 1/2 moon that caused the sky to stay lighter than we initially wanted but it added tot he light on the arch.

I only shot 15-17 min as I wanted to do some light painting with flashlights in a few other areas as well.

One nice aspect of this Star Trail is that the upper left star wasn't moving and it makes for a nice circular pattern for the stars.