Stills from the time-lapse videos — watch them in the gallery viewer below.
Long-exposure images stitched together that reveal the apparent motion of the stars as the Earth rotates — each arc a record of time passing, the fixed geometry of the sky turned into a visual record of our planet's movement.
Star trail photography captures something that the eye alone cannot perceive — the steady, continuous rotation of the Earth, revealed by tracing the paths of stars across the sky over minutes or hours. Near the celestial pole, the stars trace tight, concentric circles. Further from the pole, the arcs lengthen and sweep more dramatically.
These images can be created either through a single very long exposure or by stacking many shorter exposures — the latter approach avoids the noise accumulation of an extremely long single frame and allows more control over the final result.
The time-lapse videos in the gallery show the same phenomenon in motion — the still composites and the video sequences complement each other, the stills showing the full geometry of the night's movement and the videos making the rotation viscerally apparent.
