Thursday, May 31, 2012

Summer Milky Way Time Lapse

We had a pretty clear night on May 20, so I journeyed out to a dark site and shot more than 900 exposures of the night sky.  Each shot was 30 seconds in length and there was about a second between shots.  I catnapped in the car while the camera did the heavy lifting.  Later my laptop had to do the really heavy work of processing all those shots.  Then actually assembling them into a video clip then went pretty quickly.

A satellite goes by during the first couple seconds.  Most of the other objects flashing by are airplanes.
At 10 seconds in, Saturn and Spica make a pair towards the top center of the frame.  Scorpius is rising halfway between the cacti and the left side of the frame.
At 16 seconds, the Southern Cross pops out on the right side of the cacti and the Eta Carina nebula and open clusters are setting towards the right side of the frame.
At 24 seconds, The Scutum star cloud is at the far left end of the Milky Way band of stars.
At 36 seconds, Altair and the other stars of Aquila enter from the top left side of the frame.
At 48 seconds, Delphinus the dolphin is at the top of the screen, half way between Aquila and the left side of the frame.
Around 56 seconds, it is getting pretty cloudy, but you can glimpse Piscis Austrinus and Grus rising to the left of the cacti.

I'm embedding the clip here at a fairly large size.  If it doesn't work for you, you can see it smaller (or even larger) on YouTube.

3 comments:

Christie said...

that was amazing!

Dongatosgirl said...

I MISS THAT SKY!!

Dongatosgirl said...

I MISS THAT SKY!