Star Trails

Photograph by Josch Hambsch

Looking far, far into the past has been a passion for Josch Hambsch for more than 30 years, but it’s taken the digital revolution to let him capture the mesmerizing trails of the stars as the Earth rotates.

An amateur astronomer for nearly half his life, Hambsch waxes poetic about the night sky and the capabilities of digital photography. “I can show things never observed with the naked eye,” he says. “It’s also a very special feeling when I am imaging objects that are millions or even billions of light years away. One can see very far into our past.”

Explaining the technical side of his ethereal images, Hambsch, a nuclear scientist in Belgium, says the star trails images are actually 128 photos taken over an 11-hour period and then stitched together using a freeware program, aptly named Star Trails ( startrails.de). “Each image was exposed for five minutes at 800 ASA. Each image shows a short movement of the stars across the sky due to the Earth’s rotation, and only when all the images are combined is the nearly half-circle movement visible.”

The digital revolution has done wonders for his

work, both artistically and scientifically. He began doing star trails photography about ten years ago, but it wasn’t until two years ago, when he used a DSLR digital camera, that he considered his work a success. He also enjoys using special, cooled CCD (charge-coupled device) cameras for imaging DSOs (deep sky objects). For those, he uses a medium-sized telescope, but for the star trails images all he needs is a wide-angle lens and a long exposure time.

Light pollution in his backyard is one of the reasons Hambsch travels to very dark places like Namibia to take his exceptional images of the night sky. But he says you can still get similar images in the more light-polluted Northern Hemisphere. It’s just a matter of shorter exposure times and specialized software.

“If one thinks about the huge distances and the possibilities of the available technology to catch light that has traveled for up to several billion years, just to catch the small detector I am putting in its way, that is just fantastic.” —Shawn Connally

>> More Photos: www.astronomie.be/hambsch

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