When one thinks of astrophotography, these two aspects come to mind: 1. Rock solid mount with tracker to eliminate shakes and 2. Perfect focus to get pinpoint stars. The kind of astrophotography in this post ignores - actually violates both these principles. Some time last month, I made a post about defocusing the lens and capturing colors of twinkling Sirius. There is another way to see the colors of a star. In this method, instead of defocusing, the camera rig is shaken to create star trails. The resulting trails of bright twinkling star show the colors nicely. Here are a couple of these trails of Sirius. I like the image on the right more as it has some extra effect. The lens got defocused while I was shaking the camera and that added another dimension to it.

Along with Sirius, I also captured trails of Rigel (left), Betelguese (middle) and the three stars (right) in the belt of Orion : Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. I think they look pretty cool. Rigel is bright and a blue/white star similar to Sirius but the distribution of colors looks different. Betelguese is a red giant and it shows only one color - orange. These are fun little art projects when there isn't enough time to setup the mount and telescope and capture hours-long exposures.