Overview. Star Tracer is a Windowsprogram that can be used to improve and enhance 'star-trail' photographs. Itstwo main functions are:
Star Trail Gap Filler and Path GeneratorCurrent version 0.1.1.1, released Feb 2014. Release notes/change history.
Shooting Your Individual Star Trails Photographs. Many detailed posts have been written about how to capture individual photographs for star trails stacking, so this article will only provide a quick overview. Check out the linked posts at the end of this article for additional details. Printing Your Star Trail photos – To get the most out of photography, many people turn to printing their images. A beautiful large print of star trails is a perfect candidate for your wall. Take a look at our guide to the best photo printers to make sure yours turns out how you want it to.
Star Tracer works by calculating the path of the stars, and then usingthat information to either fill in the gaps and/or extend the length ofstar-trails.
Filling the gaps...star-trails before (left) and after (right) processing with Star Tracer
Introduction. As the long-exposurecapabilities of digital cameras have improved, they have become increasinglysuitable for use in long-exposure 'star-trail' photography, capturing the apparentmotion of the stars across the sky as the Earth rotates. Star-trail images canbe created by leaving the camera's shutter open for minutes or hours at a time.The longer the exposure, the longer the trails. A more flexible approach isto take a number of shorter exposures and then combine those images togetherusing software to create a 'synthetic' long exposure. Tawbaware's Image Stackerprogram makes this task very easy, and offers several blending modes to ensure thatthe sky does not appear over-exposed...something that can be problematic with star-trailimages taken in a single long exposure.
One of the problems with the stacking approach is that most cameras typicallypause for a short time between exposures. And, these pauses show up as 'gaps'in the resulting stacked image. Even when using a remote-control deviceto automate the triggering of the shutter, most cameras pause for some periodbetween exposures. And, many cameras perform 'noise-reduction' immediatelyafter capturing a long-exposure image, a process that can cause the camerato pause for several seconds before another image can be taken. Regardlessof the reason why the camera pauses between exposures, the resulting stackedimage often shows visible gaps. The image on the left above shows a stacked image consistingof 8 images taken with 12 second exposures. The camera paused for 3 secondsbetween each image, and these 3 second pauses appear as small gaps in the star-trails.
Star Tracer Main Window ![]() Star Trails Download For Mac Os
Gap Filling. Photographers have developedsome techniques for minimizing and/or eliminating these gaps, butnothing really satisfactory that works well for a broad range of cameras, until now.Star Tracer can 'fill in the gaps' in stacked images. It does this by calculatingthe trajectory of the stars and then using that information to precisely fill in thegaps. Gaps of any length can be filled using this technique...even if the gaps are largerthan the individual trail segments themselves.
Star-trail Extension. A second useof Star Tracer is to extend the length of star-trails in any star-trail image.Once Star Tracer has computed the trajectory of the stars, it is a simple matterto extend the trails left by the stars.
Extending the trails...extending 60 second star-trails (above) to over an hour (below)
How it Works. Conceptually, there aretwo main steps in using Star Tracer. The first main step is providing enough informationto Star Tracer so that it can determine the path of the stars. This is doneby drawing several 'star lines' on the image. These lines tell Star Tracerabout the path followed by individual stars in your image.Star Tracer uses this information to 'optimize' the project...determining thetrajectory of all the stars in the image. Even short star-trails (e.g. 60seconds) contain enough information for Star Tracer to determine the trajectory thatthe stars will take over the course of several hours.
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The second main step iscreating the output image. Once the project has beenoptimized, Star Tracer can 'rotate' the image by any amount and any number oftimes requested. You can choose to output the result as a single image,a series of images or a multi-layer Photoshop file.
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Documentation. Star Tracer offersmany more features than described here. Thecomplete Star Tracerdocumentation (with additional screenshots) is available here.
Download Here.Download Star Tracer
Purchase and License Details.Star Tracer is shareware...meaning you are expected to 'register' it(i.e. pay a small amount) to purchase the program. Before it hasbeen registered, Star Tracer places several small watermarks on the images itcreates, but no other restrictions/limitations are imposed. You can purchase aregistration license code for StarTracer on-line. Star Tracer is currently in public beta testing. Duringthis period, the license price is discounted by 25% compared to regular price.
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Contact. Please find contact details onTawbaware's homepage.
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