Michigan Star Trails

Every summer I head out to a big family reunion. Over 150 family members show up for a fun weekend of fun and catching up on the past years happenings. Quite a few folks attend the Saturday night dinner which is huge but nothing like the dinner on Sunday. This years reunion was held on a farm in Michigan.

One of the things I have loved to do up there since I was a little kid was to gaze at all the stars in the night sky. Living in the ‘burbs of Chicago I never see a sky like this. This sky is simply amazing at night up there.

As the sun starts to set most of the cousins that are camping wander over for the campfire. To say this is a fun night would be an understatement of epic proportion. Lots of fun, snacks, and a bit of alcohol. Like I said, it’s a lot of fun.

This year I slapped my camera on the tripod and hooked up my TriggerTrap for some star trail photo fun. This picture is a collection of 30 second exposures. There were 60 of them in all. I imported all the pictures into Photoshop as layers. Once that was done, I selected all the layers except for the 1st one, set the layers to “Lighten” and Boom!

This was just over a 1/2 hour of action and I would have liked to have gone longer but some clouds rolled in and while clouds can be pretty cool looking, the just didn’t work for this one.