 Star trails are the very best first project for someone new to astrophotography and in this video I'm going to show you everything that you need to do to capture and process both star trails photos and star trails time lapses like this and we're going to do this completely on your iPhone so let's jump right in the only things you'll need physically are an iPhone I'm using the iPhone 13 in this video but any iPhone will work and some kind of tripod or other way to keep the iPhone very steady while we're taking the pictures of the stars in this video I'm using a little smartphone clamp attached to my normal tripod but I've also had great success with a $12 generic smartphone tripod that I got off of Amazon so you don't have to spend a lot of money on this project that one worked great what I liked about the design of this cheap one that I got is I can put it anywhere and travel with it very easily I've tried placing it on my car on a table on a trash bin the only thing is since it's not very tall it's probably not the best tripod to use on the ground and that's it for physical items all you need is your iPhone with a fully charged battery and some space and the tripod that you can put your iPhone on in the digital realm we need a few different apps and a couple of those do cost a few dollars to download but I think it's well worth it for what they can do they're not subscription based it's one time fee and then you have them forever so let's go through the apps one by one the first app is Stellarium mobile it is free and what it does is it puts a planetarium right on your phone we'll use it to find the celestial pole which I'll explain a bit later the second app is nightcap camera this one costs 2.99 at the time of recording and if you're all interested in astrophotography on the iPhone nightcap camera I think is the one app to get we can create basic star trails images with just this app but it's also going to do a bunch of other stuff the third app is star stacker it costs 3.99 it is optional it's only needed for the complex workflow that I'll go through but I do recommend it because it gives us more control when creating the star trails images and it also gives us that option to turn our star trails into a time lapse video which I just think is really cool the fourth and final app is snap seed this app is free and it's my personal favorite app for editing astrophotography or any other kind of photography on a phone with it we can control things like the contrast and saturation in our photo very easily and this will allow us to put our final touches to taste on the photo okay with all of those apps downloaded the next step is to get outside on a clear moonless night and the final result is going to be better the darker your sky is so if you know of a park or even just a country road where it gets really dark that's ideal I'm now going to show you how to capture the star trails and I am filming this during the day so that you can clearly see what I'm doing but of course when you really do this you'll want to do it at night okay the first step is to open Stellarium and when you hold it up and move the phone around you'll you can see what stars are visible in whichever direction your phone is pointed and for your first star trails project I suggest that we point at the celestial pole all the stars in the sky appear to move around this point because it's the axis of rotation for our earth and that is what star trails are they're the visual evidence of the rotation of the earth so to find the celestial pole in the night sky in the northern hemisphere it's quite easy you can just click the search up here at the top type in Polaris which is a bright star very close to the northern celestial pole and then you just follow the arrow until you are lined up with Polaris it's at the end of the little dipper in the southern hemisphere there is no bright star close by unfortunately but you do have a constellation that is close to the pole called octans so you can type in octans O C T A N S and it will point you in the right direction so now we have to set up the iPhone so that it's pointing physically at the celestial pole and we'll stay put so you're just going to take your tripod here and I'm going to do mine horizontal rather than a vertical photo for me I think it looks better that way but of course it's up to you you might feel differently you're just going to put the phone into the clamp like that make sure it's not touching any buttons and just make sure it's nice and stable and then you're just going to point it up at the stars and lock it all down pointed at the celestial pole next we'll open up nightcap camera app and I'm going to show you the capture part in two different ways this first way is easier but the results are not quite as good but they're still excellent and we also can't turn this first method into a video the other advantage to this method the simple method is it doesn't take up a lot of space on your phone we're just going to end up with one star trails picture in the end so if you want an easy method go for this one it's still very satisfying believe me but for people that are willing to spend the four dollars on the star stacker app and also are okay with a bit more complexity stay tuned because in just a couple minutes we'll get to the more complex way to do this but first the easy way with the easy way all you have to do is open nightcap camera tap this star icon in the lower corner and turn on star trails mode you then will just tap on the screen where the stars are where the night sky is and allow nightcap to automatically set the focus and exposure level and when it's focused you should see little pin points of light like this and it will lock the focus there so you don't have to worry about it and then just press the shutter button right here it will count down and then turn solid red that's on you know it started and then all you have to do is just watch the star trails image will be created live right on screen just make sure not to bump the tripod and I would suggest waiting at least 30 minutes this is what it'll look like after 30 minutes but an hour would be even better to get longer trails when you're done just press the red button to stop and that's it exactly what you saw on screen will be saved as a photo on your phone okay next I'm going to go into the complex method but if you're not interested in that and just want to skip to the editing portion with snap seed you can hover over the video and there will be chapters allowing you to easily skip ahead to that part so I'm going to show you this more complex method next but before I do I want to share a bit about this video's sponsor Skillshare Skillshare is where I go when I want to learn some new skill or some new pieces software right now one of my goals is to learn blender and so the reason is I want to make these 3d fly-throughs of astrophotography I had an old workflow using photoshop and after effects that I think can be made much better if I actually learn 3d software so I've been sampling the different blender courses on Skillshare and one thing I like is that there are several different instructors so you can find one that gels with your learning style I'm currently taking your first day in blender 3d by southern shoddy 3d and learning a lot about how to get around in blender learning how the toolbar works and how the different layouts work in the timeline and all this different stuff that I need to know so if you'd like to try Skillshare I have a special offer just for you the first 1000 people to use the link in the description we'll get a one month free trial of Skillshare okay in the more complex method instead of being in star trails mode we want to change that to stars mode and then we want to tell it to turn on the interval timer so that's in this gear icon right here we want to turn on the interval programmer and this both both of these right here make sure this is set to five seconds we want this one set to take photos for infinity exposure should be set to five seconds and if you want to do a countdown to start you can set that right there okay and then the only other choice in here is we want to choose tiff high quality jpeg or jpeg and this depends on how much storage space you have on your phone and how much you want to use up because this method is going to take lots of individual photos you know hundreds and so I have lots of room on my phone so I'm going to choose tiff but if you didn't have much room on your phone you could choose jpeg okay then we can close the settings by just tapping the gear icon again and now we're going to set focus and exposure by just tapping on the sky and wait for it to find the stars and focus on them and now we're all ready to go so we can just go ahead and click the shutter button and it will count down and then start taking pictures and we ideally want to let this go for at least an hour the longer the better if you are worried about battery life leaving your phone out in the cold that long you can hook up a power bank ahead of time when it's all done we are going to open the star stacker app and the way this one works is you're going to start by tapping on this little pictures icon in the upper left this lets you pick your pictures so this is a little tricky but what you want to do is just sort of drag your finger over the pictures like this and then drag down faster and it'll allow you to pick lots of pictures at once so I'm just going to keep dragging down until we have all of these pictures of the stars selected this will take a little while because we took several hundred pictures this is another advantage of this method if you've made a mistake in any of your pictures like I did here with this one you can see I had my red light on in front of the camera which is a mistake and I don't want to include that in the final stack all I have to do is unselect it and not pick that one and then I can continue selecting more pictures after that so that's another advantage of the flexibility of this method is if anything they don't like happens while capturing you can just unselect those pictures okay there we go I'm done I've selected all my pictures I took one thousand nine hundred and twelve pictures of the stars all in a row it took a few hours to collect that many then I'm going to click add okay up at the top it says checking this will take a while since we're using so many pictures we'll just give it some time let it do its thing and then it says ready for stacking so to actually stack the pictures what we want to do is click up on this stacking icon this has all the options for stacking and I'm just going to do trail style full I'm going to do the full resolution I'm going to turn warp mode off and I'll click start and then this will take a while with this many pictures you know it depends on both the number of pictures that you have put in and the speed of your iPhone I guess but you can see mine here is going in real time right now and it's saying two three four so it'll take a few minutes to stack them all but just like what we were seeing in nightcap camera a fun thing about the stacking process here in this app is you can watch it stack live and it gives you a live update of what it's doing but I'm going to speed this part of the video up okay so we went through stacking just a picture but now let me show you what to do if you want to create the video because this app does have a limitation and that it doesn't seem to like to select for you to select too many images when you're making a video so I'm just going to select the first 200 here and I'm going to turn the video on to stacked leave all the rest of the stuff alone click start okay and then we can click the export button and choose movie and if it worked you should see this save video option right down here if it gave a corrupted file you won't see that save video option so then just try fewer input images but I found 200 is safe so I'm going to click save image and now if I look at my videos I can see there it is now if I wanted to do a longer animation than this a longer time lapse what I could do is just delete those first 200 images select the next 200 and make another video and then with all of and then just keep going like that in batches and string them together in iMovie which is free on your iphone and if that sounds too annoying yet another way to make the animated time lapse video is just to make a screen recording of your iphone as the star stacker app is doing this stacking of all 1900 photos that I took and then what I can do since I have this screen recording is just click edit on the screen recording and crop down the video to just that portion right there portion of the screen done and then you have and then you can trim the video down to just the part where it's going and you have a finished time lapse video it'll be a little bit low resolution but perfectly good for a phone so or sharing on social media so that's an even easier way to make the time lapse okay and then the last step in creating our star trails image is editing and we're going to use snap seed to do this so simply open snap seed click open open from device and pick your image there we go then click down here to tools and choose tune image the very first option and then you can see that top one up there right now says brightness so if I go left or right it turns up and down the brightness I'm going to leave brightness alone but I'm going to take my finger and scroll up and if I scroll up I can see all the different options here in tune image so I'm just pushing my finger up and down on the screen to get to different options I'm going to go to saturation and I'm going to bring saturation way up now I could bring it all the way up to 100 I think that looks pretty cool to see the different star colors but I'm going to do something a little bit more understated and do maybe plus 50 or plus 60 okay and you can play around with some of these other ones ambience and highlights and so forth to alter the image to your taste now I think it already did a pretty good job with the star the natural star colors so I wouldn't necessarily want to mess around with warmth unless you were going for just a fantasy image but if you actually want to see the natural star colors don't mess around too much with the color temperature just mess around with saturation and contrast and things like that all right I think that looks good so I'm going to hit actually let me show you one more thing if you just tap and hold you can see before and then if you let go it shows you the after so it's sort of a subtle change but I think it looks really nice like that so I'm going to go ahead and click this little check mark down in the lower right hand corner and then click export and export a copy so now if I look in my photos there's my final star trails image which I think looks really good well I hope this star trails tutorial was helpful and I hope to make ones like this for android phones and maybe DSLR users in the future so let me know in the comments if you have any questions till next time this was Nico Carver, Nebula Photos, Clear Skies