Startrails: Your Go-To for Effortless Star Trails!

A friend recently introduced me to Startrails, and I instantly fell in love with it! It’s a tiny, portable application (no installation needed!) that lets you stack multiple short-exposure images (often taken with wide-angle lenses) to create beautiful star trails.

It’s actually much better to create star trails from multiple short exposures rather than a single long one. Why? Because it significantly reduces image noise, boosts dynamic range, and even helps minimize the visible impact of light pollution!

While you could achieve this in Photoshop by stacking individual images on layers using the “lighten” blend mode, let me tell you, it takes serious dedication (and patience!) to stack dozens of frames that way!!!

Here’s “Le petit Borobia” by Julio Corredera, processed with Startrails:

Startrails can also create mesmerizing “Earth rotation” timelapses or even extract the background from an image. I’m not getting anything for saying this, but I highly recommend you give this free software a try! Just make sure you have the .NET framework installed beforehand.