One of the most exciting aspects of astrophotography is the number of challenges, one must face in an effort to capture the elusive twinkling stars. Star Trails are relatively simple. You just put a camera and a wide lens on a tripod and take continuous shots for a couple of hours. After stacking the photos you get the apparent motion of stars in a single frame.
But what about capturing all-night star trails during the longest night of the year? What will look like? If you turn your camera North and shoot Polaris for 12 hours you will get a perfect semi-circle, since the day has 24 hours. I have been planning this long star trail shooting for years, looking for a proper foreground to combine. There are so many things that can go wrong. Essentially, we need a completely clear night in the middle of the winter. Even a small cloud that blocks the field of view for a few minutes would ruin the shooting. A few more challenges include dew, forming on the lens during the cold winter nights, uninterrupted powering of the camera for the whole night or even fighting with exhaustion and trying not to accidentally kick the tripod as you move around the camera in the dark.
I finally found the opportunity to attempt the capture. The weather prediction looked good for the night of December 25, 2022. The place: Euboea (Evia) island in Greece. Castle of Fylla. Years ago I first noticed the ideal orientation in relation to Polaris and anticipated capturing it. On top of all the technical challenges, a few days ago, my intervalometer, dew heater and camera external power source, all stop working(!). With only a couple of days to think about workarounds, I used hand warmers instead of a dew heater, the Nikon d600 embedded interval timer shooting feature (trickiest intervalometer ever to make it work!) and switching batteries fast, really carefully for not moving the camera, instead of the external power source for the long shooting.
Miraculously, everything worked, and this is the result after 12 hours and 15 minutes of shooting, 1635 shots and several hours post-processing later! 🙂
