Your Ghost

Star Trails stretching out above and around Uluru in Australia's outback.

This was taken on our first night in Uluru, and is one of my hero shots from the entire Astro Workshops trip, so I feel it's fitting to end this series with it.

I have to be honest with you, I hadn't really thought this shot through. Normally when you do star trails you should align your camera so it's facing at least one of the poles, but for this shot I just plonked the tripod down with Uluru front and centre and started taking photos.

Luckily I was using a 14mm wide-angle lens which meant I could capture a wider field of view (in other words - a lot more of the sky around Uluru). In fact, it's so wide you can see the concentric circles of stars heading towards both poles! It does make me wonder what it would have been like if I'd had an even wider lens...

If you look close enough, you can also see the ghost of the Milky Way glowing ever so slightly behind the star trails and above the rock itself.

These trails are a blend of 130 images taken over about 80 minutes. I then took each of these images and ran them through a program called StarStaX (which is a super easy and convenient way of stacking a lot of images without the hassle of layers in Photoshop). I also used an earlier photo (from the same spot) for the foreground.

I hope you've enjoyed my Uluru series, though I have absolutely no idea what I'll post next.

The details for this image are:

• NikonD750 with Samyang 14mm f/2.8

• Sirui W-1204 tripod with K-20x Ball Head⁣

• 20s

• f/2.8

• ISO3200