How to shoot star trails?

I hav nikon d3100, i have all equipment for long exposure except my camera dies. It is also hard to find the correct exposure, I live on 3 acres of land and I would enjoy capturing a trail.

Perhaps there's some way to run the camera on external power, maybe with USB. Check the Nikon web site. With a film camera you could just open the shutter and the camera didn't consume any power.

Using a dSLR with a CMOS sensor to shoot star trails can be problematic, since after a short time, the sensor will start to overheat causing the sensor to shut off the camera

You can use some kind of remote shutter release that includes an interval timer (for shooting time lapse sequences)

During the last meteor shower, I used 62 images taken during the shower, but only captured one meteor during the hour of shooting. The result after stacking the all the images, I was able to create an interesting image from an otherwise unsuccessful shooting session.

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After this test, my guess is that increasing the f/stop to f/8 or even f/5.6 may have increased the light saturation of the stars (and single meteor