06May15 star trail

I honored the 2015 Eta Aquariids meter shower with a multi-goal project.  I imaged with a 14mm lens on my Canon DSLR, attached to a tracking equatorial mount.  Civil dusk (8:22PM) to civil dawn (5:03AM), so nearly 9 hours.  Here is the special thing- I aligned the mount to near the zenith (fictitious pole), not the North Celestial Pole.  My backyard zenith view with my 14 mm lens clips trees all the way around, so I aligned the mount to rotate around the unobstructed view, so the trees would spin around the perimeter of the image. I didn’t imagine the star trail would look like this.  Other than polaris (circle relative to my fictitious pole) stars, I think other stars would track on their own elliptical path, location would be a function of it’s declination relative to NCP and the fictitious pole. Each star has it’s own arc, which explains why some crossed over each other during the night.  

Here is the time lapse video, published to my Flickr account.  
https://www.flickr.com/photos/garyaphillip