Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Semi Starry Nights

We are having some clear-ish nights this week here on Bonaire. They start clear and starry, and then get progressively more cloudy. But some stars are better than no stars I guess.
I was out at Red Slave last night with the Bucklands, and while we fooled around with his camera and with the binoculars, I had my camera on a tripod taking twenty second long time exposures with a 14mm Samyang lens at f/2.8. I ended up with 64 images before we needed the tripod for Colin's camera.
That's us moving around by the cars, and my laptop and red night vision lights illuminating that part of the scene.
I turned the individual pictures into a movie running at ten frames a second, and you can see the clouds and stars move across the scene as time passed.
I'm hoping for clear skies this summer, when I'm planning on doing a much longer time lapse sequence featuring the summer milky way.
Oh, one really cool thing about the video, to me anyway, is that if you look just above the point of the peak of the roof of the last hut to the right, you can just see the faint glow of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Amazing Movie - looks great in only 6 seconds.
Looking fwd to to longer movies !

Pierre Schmid in Switzerland

Pierre said...

Amazing movie...very nice !

Brad said...

This clip looks amazing to me blown up to full screen size. It may be because I uploaded a full on uncompresses avi file to YouTube. The file size was not too large since it was so short.