Star trails can look quite amazing in photos but they often lack a key element, the foreground. Fortunately this doesn’t always have to be the case. Thanks to the digital darkroom (more specifically applications like photoshop or if you prefer a free alternative www.startrails.de ) you can put together a group of images to form one composite image.
Dan Newton has written an excellent tutorial on this which you can find on his blog Liquid in Plastic, click here to read this wonderful post. The tutorial shows you how best to capture the source images and how to use either star trails or photoshop to produce the composite photo.
Dan Heller has also written quite a comprehensive page on star trail and wide field astrophotography, check it out here. Another great resource with lots of technical information and guides is this page by Naturescapes, check it out here. For a more local feel check out this fellow kiwis site.
If you are lucky enough to have Photoshop CS3 extended then check out this amazing video tutorial ”Stacking Technique for Star Trails” by Patti Schulze, posted in November 2008 on The Mindful Eye website. You can view it here on you tube or here on The Mindful Eye. In this tutorial Patti shows how she created an image that includes both star trails and rock columns to create a dynamic image.
There are a number of photoshop actions out there that can automate the process, here is a link to one of the most popular ones.
Once you have taken your wonderful image you of course will want to share your success or your confusion with others. Fortunately flickr has just the forum for you. The group is aptly named star trails and can be found here.
For those of you who want to photograph the moon, on my wanders I found this site which provides a virtual moon atlas, you can find it here.