startrails

Some lenses produced from the 1940s through the 1970s were treated with radioactive thorium oxide to curb chromatic aberration. But as Andrew Walker explains in this 7.5-minute video, modern digital cameras can actually "see" that radiation as image noise that has the potential ruin your long exposures.

Every Sunday, we bring together a collection of easy reading articles from analytical to how-to to photo-features in no particular order that did not make our regular daily coverage. Enjoy!

As you may very well know, long exposure photography is a method by which you expose a sensor to a scene for an extended period of time. But in this 15-minute video, PiXimperfect asks the question, then isn't a video just a long exposure? Well, not really, but you can use a video to make long exposure photos.

In his TimeScapes series, photographer Martien Janssen has been "playing with the element of time," combining images in creative ways to create "a new type of dimension" in his time-lapse photography. And there's no better example of this than his film TimeBlend.

For the past several years, German freelance photographer Nikita Roytman has been working on a personal photo project in which he does landscape astrophotography in the style and mood of the 19th-century Pictorialism movement. The series is titled "Nocturnal Mood Of Time."

During an earthquake, a camera capturing a long exposure of the night sky can capture star trails as seismograms that records the motion of the ground.

Here's an 8-minute tutorial from Nature TTL and astrophotographer Matthew Saville about how to photograph star trails. Considered by some as the holy grail of astrophotography, this technique harnesses the rotation of the Earth for captivating images.

Here's a beautiful new short film by time-lapse photographer Tyler Hulett of Discover Oregon. Titled "Oregon Trails," it shows stacked star trails swirling over the beautiful landscapes of Oregon.

We recently shared a 52-week photo challenge you can do to improve you skills over the course of a year. The challenge for week #1 was "self portrait," and photographer Trevor Mahlmann completed it by creating this eye-popping photo, titled "The Universe At My Feet."

Did you know that you can easily see geostationary satellites by shooting time-lapse photos of the night sky? Reddit user jannne took his camera outside this week and managed to capture a number of satellites in their photos.

What kind of nighttime time-lapses could you shoot in cities like Los Angeles if light pollution weren't a problem? A couple of time-lapse photographers want to show you. They've created an experimental time-lapse that shows a sky full of stars and star trails over the light-polluted city of Los Angeles.

Polish photographer Bartosz Wojczyński pointed his camera straight at the north celestial pole and exposed his camera for a total of six hours. The photograph above is what resulted.

I’ve always found photos of star trails -- the arcs the stars paint across the sky as the earth turns -- fascinating. They’re one of the things that we can “see” with a camera that we can’t see with our eyes. Technology has changed how we shoot star trails, making star trail shots in locations we previously thought impossible possible.

Here's a neat video that shows what you get in a star trails time-lapse if you slowly move your lens' zoom ring over the course of the long exposures. Long exposures naturally create star trails around Earth's axis of rotation, but throw in some motorized zooms and you can turn those ordinary trails into some pretty trippy effects.

Due to the rotation of the Earth, it appears as though the stars are moving through the sky in long exposures. Star trails can be a desired effect when done for much longer exposures, but in other cases we want points of light to represent how we see the stars with our eyes. To achieve points of light you can use a simple rule that's often called the "500 Rule".

270 photographs and a total exposure time of two hours and fifteen minutes went into creating this stunning composite photograph of an Indonesian landscape complete with an erupting volcano, a steaming caldera, a meteor, copious amounts of fog and beautiful light trails created by cars traveling below the fog.

A common technique used in still astrophotography is the creation of startrails, a method by which a photographer overlays multiple long-exposure shots of the stars to create a weaving of constellations. But, as time-lapse photograph and astrophotography have merged in a fairly recent trend, a number of artists have been bringing the idea of startrails to motion-picture, creating what many refer to as ‘vortex startrails.’

We've seen both night sky and 360º time-lapses before, but we hadn't ever run across an amalgamation of the two until earlier this week when we received an email from photographer Vincent Brady.

Firefly photography isn't a novel concept. In fact, long-exposure images of these glowing creatures lighting up beautiful forest scenes have appeared on PetaPixel a couple of times before... we've even featured a tutorial on the subject. But photographer Vincent Brady's firefly time-lapse above IS novel.

It's novel, not because it's a time-lapse of fireflies (we're sure that's been done a time or two) but because he combined many different photographic techniques to create something truly breathtaking.

The lens is the most important factor in the image quality of a landscape astrophoto.

There are a number of lens traits that will determine the quality and usability of a camera lens for astrophotography. Let me explain what sort of thinking should go into choosing and using a lens for making astrophotography and Milky Way nightscapes.

We've seen some pretty cool and trippy time-lapses before (the few "lyric lapse" videos we've shared immediately come to mind) but the Borrego Stardance above takes the cake. Mixing massive metal sculptures of dinosaurs, insects, mammoths and more with beautiful star trails and the milky way, the folks at Sunchaser Pictures have created a time-lapse truly worthy of the designation "trippy."

For over a year now, photographer Shawn Stockman Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto has been pointing her cameras at the sky over Michigan's Lake Superior and capturing dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.

Photographer Richard Gottardo tells us that he spent a few months in the Rocky Mountains, trying to see and photograph the Northern Lights. A brilliant aurora display finally happened a week ago, and Gottardo's mission was accomplished.

Ever see those pictures where the stars streak across the sky in a big arc? Or maybe the whole sky looked like it was spinning? What you saw was star trails. The streaks were light left behind on the sensor or film from the star as it traveled across the sky in front of an open camera shutter. In fact, what are being recorded are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth as it spins past them. For me, the images seem to have a certain magic or mystery about them.

You must have heard a photographer talking about capturing that perfect moment in time. Well for capturing star trails you will need to capture the perfect hour or two in time. For such amazing looking images, the technique used to capture them is really quite simple. Keep reading for a complete set of instructions from start to finish.

Some people have been asking for tips on how to do star trails. There seems to be a few misconceptions and a few different methods. Here's a tutorial on my personal technique.

We've shared plenty of gorgeous time-lapse videos of the night sky and "tiny world" images, but what do you get when you combine the two concepts? French photographer Stephane Vetter shows us with the video above, titled "Leonid and Zodiacal Light."

North Carolina-based photographer Daniel Lowe sent us the gorgeous video above, which shows star trails forming and floating across the sky. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show stars as points of light, rotating around Earth's pole. Lowe's video shows the long streaks of star trails doing the rotating, making the video even more surreal and magical.

Photographer Knate Myers of Albuquerque, New Mexico created this awe-inspiring time-lapse video using …

Last month we shared a long exposure photograph by NASA astronaut Don Pettit that showed star trails and city trails in the same frame. Turns out the photo was just one of many long exposure images shot by Pettit so far during Expedition 31. The photograph above shows star trails, an aurora, and flashes of lightning splattered all across the surface of the Earth.

Babak Tafreshi of The World at Night …

Here’s an amazing time-lapse video that was made using time-lapse photography shot over six months in the beautiful state …