Day 65: Spinning Stars

2026-04-12

Back among the starry night sky...

Hello! Every so often, I cycle through a regular process of building a high ego over something stupid and having it crash down. I wonder if this blog is unintentionally becoming an ego thing.

Anyway, enjoy an article of me praising myself on how clever I am.

The effect of star trails spinning around a central point was done in-camera; I don't even know how I would do this in editing.

I forgot my tripod, so the camera was set on a fence post. I took several shots of the bright stars at night, but none of them captured the special feeling of starlight that I felt that night. I've lived through thousands of nights, and I've seen the stars often, but never this many! Without light pollution, they really show up.

But they're dots in the sky, and hard to capture with a camera. I had to let the camera open the sensor for a longer time, exposing it to thirty seconds of starlight. I figured that I could make any motion blur seem intentional, so for some shots, I moved the camera on purpose.

This was the only time it worked. The camera faced the stars, and I slowly turned it on the fence post. Stars in the center of frame haven't changed much, but as you go further to the sides, the arc of star trails increases in length. Wonderful.

I wonder if, despite all my explanations of the photography process in detail, photography and art comes across like drawing an owl: there's not enough detail in between start and finish. I had the benefit of taking a short course on photography in school, but I knew the course material already and just used the class as a space to experiment. The theory is self-learned, which means there's no end in sight; I'm always still learning, and no end-of-school degree will mark the completion of my search for photography knowledge.

Cheers,
David