Star Trail at 14200 ft | Tapovan

...Its not unknown that astro-photography requires prior planning and preparation. Outdoor long exposure photography often comes with unforeseen challenges that play a pivotal role in making or breaking the shot...

The shot that is displayed above was at least 3 months in the making. 3 months of rigorous preparation for 2 and 1/2 hours of shooting. This is a post where I will break down the challenges I faced, ones that fellow astro-photography enthusiasts must anticipate, when starting off with their next project.

Before I begin, let me specify the camera settings that I used for this shot.

Aperture: f-3.5

It was set to as low a value as my camera would allow. This was done to ensure that as much light was allowed to come in as possible.

Shutter Speed: 30 seconds

ISO: 1200

Intervalometer Setting: 1 sec interval, infinite shots

As I said, I had been preparing for this shot for a little over 3 months. I live in the immensely light and air polluted city of Kolkata, therefore practicing amidst scarcely visible stars wasn't easy. On a rainy day, as the sky would marginally clear up after a shower, it would present a small window of opportunity whilst I would find myself on the terrace of my house with my camera pointed at the vast expanse of outer space. My first ever star trail was 45 mins long, trails were short and full of jitters.

My first ever star trail

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There is a lot to learn around the subject. I'll begin by dropping a short introduction to what star trails are:

Star Trails - How they are formed

Star trails don't exist naturally like the milky way galactic core. They are merely a mode of representation. Stars in the sky change their positions relative to viewers on earth due to its rotation about its axis. If enough number of photographs are taken and stacked together, the trail of these starts begin appearing hence forming the star trail. All stars move except the north star (Polaris) so if you point your camera at the Polaris, you will get circular ring trails around it.

Some equipment that are a must-have are as follows:

Sturdy tripod	​To ensure that the camera doesn't move while the shot is being captured, which often takes hours
DSLR camera or Mirrorless camera	These offer some control over some essential parameters such as shutter speed, aperture and ISO
Intervalometer	External or inbuilt, this device is a must have for long exposure shooting especially when the stacking method is used.

That being said, lets move ahead to Tapovan, on the eventful night of June 24th, 2022. It was a starry night and the sky was crystal clear with not a hint of a cloud to be found anywhere. It was the perfect opportunity for a star trail. Mt. Shivling in the backdrop would have been the perfect icing on the cake.

To make things simpler, the entrance to my tent faced the mountain, which meant that I could conduct the entire process from the comfort of my tent. The tent had little protection to offer with the outside temperature dwelling in the sub-zero levels, but it was better than sitting outside.

I setup my portable tripod, fixed my camera to it and tightened the ball-head. For those who haven't shot in pitch darkness before, its important to note that the entire stage would appear to be pitch dark oblivion and only long exposure, high ISO camera shots would be able to make sense of the surroundings. That brings up the million dollar question: How do you compose?

How does one figure out which way to point the camera and what to focus on? Afterall, after 3 hrs. of shooting no-one wants to find the composition messed up. The standard method of doing this is to take very high ISO shots to find your subjects and then use manual focus and digital zoom to focus on one of the stars in the sky. The trick is to digitally zoom into one of the stars and keep rotating the focus ring to make that star as small as possible.

My very first high ISO focus shot revealed Mt. Shivling against a starry night sky.

Mt. Shivling against the stars (ISO - 64000)

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With the composition proper and the night sky diamond studded, I tucked myself into a fleece jacket, a padded jacket, thermals and half a sleeping bag and started my shot around 11pm. In my head, I had a 3hr long shot planned. After automating the intervalometer, I tucked myself fully into my sleeping bag, turned my head towards the flap of the tent and lay down. I tried sleeping but instead stayed up with my eyes wide open to look up at the beautiful night sky through the semi-parted flap of my tent.

1 and 1/2 hours later I woke up and realized I had dosed off. It had gotten extremely chilly, I could barely feel my hands and my cheeks and my nose were numb against the head-flap of my sleeping bag. I sat up to check the status of my camera and to my dismay the entire lens was covered with condensation water. Needless to say, moisture had ruined the last few shots. Despite all of this, I let the camera keep to shooting for half an hour more and then turned it off and went to sleep.

There were two things that went wrong that night, one that was evident from the moisture in the lens and another more elusive one that only became clear when I started stacking the shots together back home. My tripod was a portable one, one that had flexible legs and was compact in size, making it easy to carry on a trek. The tradeoff was in stability. The light weight and flexible legs of the tripod made it unstable and while it performed perfectly well for regular 20 - 30 second long exposure shots, it faced some issues when doing 2 - 3 hr. long exposure shots. This instability showed up as small jitters when I started stacking the shot, one can notice these jitters quite easily if one takes a closer look at the very first image of star trail against Mt. Shivling that I have posted here.

Few of the gaps in between have also been caused by small strands clouds drifting across the night sky, thereby temporarily obscuring the stars.

Of all these unforeseen parameters, the easily avoidable ones were the lens condensation and the Jitters. To control the jitters one needs to carry a larger, sturdier tripod and weight down using some extra weight for extra stability. As for the condensation. there is a device in the market known as a lens warmer, a small battery operated strap-like device that keeps the lens warm for hours (close to 8 to 9 hrs of shooting time on full charge)

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To bring things to a conclusion, here is a picture of me at Tapovan with my tent flap open and my camera outside.

Hope you guys find this informative. I am new to astro-photography and am learning new things everyday. If you have any suggestions for me on how to do this better, I'd love to hear them in the comments section bellow.

Thank you and happy shooting!