Star Trails

I thought with the area of high pressure over us there would be a totally clear sky but unfortunately there were low clouds around which spoil the overall image a bit. I tried to overcome this by removing the later images where the cloud layer was growing quite a bit. However, I was pleased that for the first time I was able to get the concentric circles of star trails around the north star. 

I also had to do a fair bit of cleaning up as there were some areas of light pollution from our security lights and from aircraft flying across the image. The image is a blend of around 800 photographs using StarTrax software. I had taken over a thousand images over the course of an hour by setting the camera on continuous play and locking the shutter down with a remote cord. Sounds quite complicated but it is relatively easy once you have set up your camera and worked the best exposure time.

The trees look a bit distorted as I was using my wide angle zoom at its widest setting but I did not want to correct this in post processing as it would have spoilt the circular star trails.