File:Steve Ryan - Stars around Polaris - Day 62 (by-sa).jpg

I took a somewhat similar shot at the time of the Leonid meteor shower, but wanted to repeat it with the north star in the view. This was taken with a nearly full moon which lit up the trees and added background light to the sky, but a reasonable number of stars were still visible.

Stop now if you don't want all the details... - This was created from 149 separate 10-second exposures. All were shot at F2.8, 17mm focal length, and ISO 1600. - Combining these images in my photo software would have required over 1000 mouse operations, so I modified an old Java program I had lying around to do the job. - The software simply chose the brightest value from each of the 149 files for each pixel. - Each star path has a gap in it about 2/3 of the way through because there was a delay between the first 100 images an the rest. - The trees were lit by moonlight, and briefly by some light through a skylight in the house below. - The dotted lines represent passing aircraft, and the gaps in those lines are due to a delay of a few seconds between each exposure. - I actually took the images on December 1, but I don't feel too badly posting the result as my December 2 picture of the day because I did all the coding and processing on the 2nd. - I did <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/juniorvelo/312646148/">take</a> <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/juniorvelo/312644520/">other</a> <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/juniorvelo/312644722/">pictures</a> on the 2nd.