I finally figured out why my star trails look like dotted lines and it was the dumbest thing

Jana Ward · 2026-10-01T23:50:05.143232+00:00

Honestly I spent about 8 months thinking my mount was junk. Every star trail shot I took at my usual spot outside Flagstaff came out looking like someone drew it with a broken pen, all these little dashes with gaps between them. I blamed the tripod, I blamed wind, I even drove 2 hours to a darker site thinking light pollution was somehow causing it. Then a guy at a star party glanced at one of my shots and asked what interval I had set on my intervalometer. I said 1 second, thinking that was just the standard thing. He laughed and said that gap was my problem, the shutter needs zero delay between shots or you lose that little slice of sky every single frame. I switched it to 0 seconds and the very next night my trails were perfectly smooth. Been shooting this stuff for almost 3 years and nobody ever mentioned it, it never came up in any tutorial I watched. Anyone else get tripped up by some setting that turned out to be staring you right in the face?

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I finally figured out why my star trails look like dotted lines and it was the dumbest thing | Astronomy Photos - The Community Guide