Categories: AstronomyVideos

Stunning Star Trails Mania

You like star trails? We’ve got star trails! One of our favorite timelapse gurus, Gavin Heffernan from Sunchaser Pictures shot this stunning footage, and as he says, no special effects of any kind are needed to create star trails: just leave your shutter open and the natural rotation of Earth takes care of the rest!

But wait… there’s more!

Have you ever compared how different star trails look in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere?

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César Cantú has:

From the northern hemisphere, stars appear to move counterclockwise around the north pole of the sky; but if you stand at any point in the earth’s southern hemisphere, the stars appear to move clockwise around the south pole of the sky. César, who mans the Chilidog Observtory, took star trail footage from Mexico and Africa and combined the two to create an incredible “Hemispheric Countersense” video. See more about it here.

Combining star trails from Mexico and Africa. Credit: César Cantú

Scene from Sunchaser Star Trails. Credit: Gavin Heffernan. Footage shot in Big Bear Lake, Joshua Tree, and also Canada. Used Canon 5D & 7D, with a 24mm/1.4 lens and a 28mm/1.8.

SUNCHASER STAR TRAILS from Sunchaser Pictures on Vimeo.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/