Click to play embedded YouTube video.
This animation took over 5000 frames to complete, taken over a period of three months. Each frame is a 60 second exposure. Multiple focal lengths were used, from 15mm to 600mm. The images were all registered (aligned) with each other and the zoom was accomplished digitally, dissolving from one focal length into another.
With this method I did my best to emphasize the transient nature of the night sky, showing the changing airglow (green and red color casts washing through the images) and satellites passing through this region of space. The stars will even have a bit of a twinkle to them from different seeing conditions. Everything you see is real.
Additionally I created a starless background image from the same data for each focal length. The timelapse of each frame was overlaid over the starless image using the screen method so it all blended together nicely.
Image processing (calibration, registration, color correction, star extraction) was done in Pixinsight and the animations were created in DaVinci Resolve.
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