Here I'm going to explain how I created ‘Close Encounters of the Haslingden Kind’, my Highly Commended image in 2023's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.
In brief, this was a composite of star trails and the Halo sculpture that overlooks Haslingden, Lancashire. I took 151x 25-second exposures of the night sky with my Sony A7IV camera (20mm f4, ISO 160) and stacked these with StarStax (freeware) to make the star trails. Thefree shot of myself standing underneath. This brighter foreground was then merged with the star trail in Photoshop.
