Lessons learnt from recent star trail experiment

There were lot things lacking in my first experiment of star trails. I am not kind of guy who achieves success at first attempt. Most of the time it is long hard journey. Initially, even though it creates disappointment, the joy of struggling is more exciting once we reach appreciable level. There were many faults in my recent experiment as mentioned. Time to correct those and build on top of that. The mistakes were spotted while reading write-ups from professionals. Following are the mistakes ;-).

1. Long exposure noise reduction should be turned OFF (my settings were ON)
2. Do not get illusioned by camera light metering. My image was shown as over exposed by light meter :-(. Ultimately they looked darker. So I should have exposed shutter for bit more longer time (around 25s).
3. ISO should have been around 1600
4. Should have focused upfront. I was struggling getting focus right at night. Many people suggest to focus to infinity around twilight and prepare to shoot at night.

There may be many more. Need to experiment lot more to get it right. However the experiment can be carried out only in my village and there is less scope in Bangalore. Hope will improve in my next trial :-).

Here are two start trail images created using StarStaX free software. There are gaps in between the trail which I need to rectify. The software is available for linux also but has some bugs. So I ran windows version on top of wine emulator and worked perfectly :-).

THIS IS BRIGHTEST BUT MORE GAPS!

THIS IS DARKEST BUT LESS GAPS. A SLIGHT INCREASE IN ISO WOULD HAVE HELPED