One Night in Alsace

 I have not long returned from a week's holiday in Alsace, a truly beautiful region of France. We stayed in a fabulous cottage on a hillside 700m above a village called Fraize. On the second night of the stay there was a beautifully clear sky and although the moon was in its third quarter and very bright it was still possible to look up and see more stars than I would ever see in the sky above my home in the North West of England. So of course I couldn't resist getting out there to capture some pictures of the stars.

For the first image I have stacked 22 separate 20 sec shots to try to capture part of the spiral of the milky way. It is far from perfect I know; I did not use enough dark frame shots to reduce noise in the image hence the annoying horizontal line, and of course despite using the tree to the right of the image to mask the moon it was so bright and some of the colours are washed out. Even so the number of stars visible in this shot is incredible.

For the second image I have gone for my second ever attempt at a star trail and I am really pleased with this one...

I took a few test shots to try to get the image framed right. The illumination of the house is entirely from the moon across the valley. The cottage had a security light over the front door and to avoid setting that off I had to climb in and out of the dining room window which was fun especially when I startled a local cat that was hunting in the hedges close by.

This image is a composite of 204 shots each of 30 seconds so taken over a 2 hour period. There was a 3 sec cooling down period between each exposure and I have had to eliminate some shots because of a plane flying through which left an annoying yellow streak through my first attempt at processing this. Actually this was the third attempt because for the first one I was aligning the stars rather than setting up for a star trail so it was very disjointed and I thought I had messed it up. However taking the time to review it meant I finally got it right even though i had been ready to abandon the project altogether. I am so glad I stuck with it and hopefully you will agree that it was worth it.