First test of the Dwarf 3's Star Trail Mode. 720 × 30s, 6 hours total.
DwarfLab recently added a dedicated Star Trail Mode to the app and I finally had the opportunity to try it. Point the wide-angle lens north, tap the mode, walk away. The app stacks frames additively in real time as they come in. No post-session stacking required. This is 720 frames at 30 seconds each, six hours total.
A few things worth noting in the image:
At six hours, each star traces exactly 90 degrees, one quarter of a full circle. Earth takes 23 hours 56 minutes for a full rotation so the math works out cleanly. You can verify the arc length geometrically in the image.
Polaris is not perfectly centered on the north celestial pole. It sits about 0.7 degrees off, which is why it draws a small arc near center rather than holding a fixed point.
The color in the trails is real astrophysics, not a processing artifact. Star color maps directly to surface temperature. Hotter stars go blue-white, cooler stars go orange-red. It does not come through strongly in the raw stack output but a saturation push in Snapseed pulled it out cleanly.
The two diagonal lines are satellites or aircraft. Star Trail Mode does not reject frames so anything that crossed the field during a single exposure stays in the final image.
More details in my full write up on the session here: https://dwarfastro.com/2026/05/04/dwarf-3-star-trail-mode-720-frames/
Clear Skies,
AK