Well, I'm sure this won't do too well because I've seen some of the astrophotography shots on this site. But still, at least this challenge got me to go out and do one of these star trails shots which I've been wanting to do for a long time.
I'm pleased with the result for a first effort. I read about the method of stacking shorter exposures to keep the sky darker today... too late unfortunately.
In capture NX, I adjusted the exposure to make 3 different tifs, which I blended in gimp using the exposure blend plugin. This allowed me to have the sky as dark as possible and still bring out the details of the hill and bushes in the foreground.
Then made some curves, color saturation, a bit of dodging and burning of the foreground, then resize and unsharp mask.
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Top 10? Great job composing this image with the spiral focused on the upper left rule of third and the mountain along the bottom rule of third. I think this would ribbon if you could see the silhouette of someone standing on top of the left "peak" with their arms outstretched (which would suck to hold for the 1 minute plus time that took you to shoot this =).
I feel this could have benefited from some levels - or curves. It looks somewhat dusty and washed out, which takes from the awesome star movement you captured.
Nice. That smudge to the right, something that happened in PP? I assume it is the noice reduction, that screwed up the star trails further from the north star? Perhaps you could have darkened it all, to bring out the stars better, and tone down the ground. Lifting the angle to clear the trees would have been beneficial and given you more stars (but you probably didn't even see them in the dark).
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