In GIMP go to Filters>Blur>Motion Blur… adjust the angle by dragging the angle slider and keep an eye on the effect in the preview window. In Paint.NET go to Effects>Blur>Motion Blur leave the effect to 10px and drag the angle in the circle so that it matches the angle of the selected star trails. Select a group of star trails that have roughly the same angle (pointing in the same direction).Flatten your image (in both Paint.NET and GIMP go to Image>Flatten).If your camera needed some processing time between each photo, resulting in something resembling LEDs: continue reading. In GIMP select each layer and change the blending mode in the layers dock (top right). In Paint.NET select each layer and press F4 and change the blending mode in the bottom of the properties box. Change the blending mode of all the layers to Lighten. Now it's time to combine all these exposures so you get a nice looking trail: If you want longer trails you'll have to stay out longer. After 5:48 minutes I decided it was cold and I wanted to see the result.My camera processor took a while to process each 15-second photo, which can be seen on the original photo as gaps between the stars' different positions. If you cannot put the camera in continuous shooting mode at least turn off the automatic preview function so there is as little delay between the pictures as possible. Better still buy a D-SLR and a cable release to go with it. Then you could use tape to keep the shutter button pressed down. If you can, set your camera in continuous shooting mode.If you own a compact camera you might want to switch to Night Mode or something similar, to get the longest exposure. Set your exposure to the longest possible.I directed my camera NNE and it still turned out great. You don't have to direct it exactly at the polar star but it looked great in Practical Photography. Put your camera on a tripod, directed at the sky.I used 10 photos for the final image, and I wished I had taken 50 at least. Check the space on the memory card you want to take a lot of pictures.If you want to make a star trail photo, here is how to do it: I didn't have an interesting foreground object so I directed my camera at the night sky and started firing off shots, each with the longest exposure I could get, which is 15 seconds. The photos were of an interesting foreground object with a clear night sky in the background. In Practical Photography they took 120 photos with an exposure of 30 seconds. I obviously read how to do this in Practical Photography, issue November 2008. Because I didn't know if this would work with my cheap Samsung L73 compact camera I decided to only make a 150 second exposure. There are even some gimp plugins to automate the process for the user, such as GIMP Star Trails Compositor or StarTrails for videos.For those of you who haven't seen my star trail picture on can check it out here. Repeat the above step for all angles of star trails.Go to Filters>Blur>Motion Blur… adjust the angle by dragging the angle slider and keep an eye on the effect in the preview window. If your camera needed some processing time between each photo, resulting in something resembling LEDs: continue with: One that I found that was nice and concise was this and the processing steps were: Lots of tutorials on the net for how to make star trails using gimp which is a free, open source, cross platform and very powerful photo editing tool.
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