You are lying on a blanket on a clear summer night and gazing at the dark starry sky. You are trying to spot the big dipper, Andromeda, or maybe Orion. However you are noticing strange bright patches aligned in a band across the night sky and realize they are not stars: it is our home town, our own galaxy, the milky way. That’s how all star-gazing experiences, hobbies, but also the history of astronomy began: from naked eye observations thousands of years ago, to the finest and biggest telescopes today, capable of unravelling the most intriguing secrets of the universe. As the hobby or science grows and evolves, we always want to go deeper and zoom in. You are now seeing not only our galaxy, but billions of them!
With the first opus of the short film series ‘Galaxies’, I wanted to experiment and take the astro-timelapse technique to the next level. There are a lot of sumptuous short films and very technical time-lapses featuring the milky way, but I found very little variation in this field. Most of the time they show a wide-angle view of the milky way, albeit majestic, rising or setting against various foregrounds. This is the reason why I wanted to rethink the whole process, find different angles, get more detail. Why not zoom in? Why not consider other deep-sky objects like other galaxies? Why not show our very space home address and neighborhood in a very different way?
I started thinking about making time-lapse of deep-sky objects about three years ago when I bought my tracker. I would experiment and track the Andromeda galaxy moving in front of rocks, monuments, trees, behind northern lights. I extended the limits of wide-field astro-timelapse (10-35mm) to a more middle (50-85mm) and narrow-field (> 85mm). It gives a lot of new options and reveals the true beauty and detail of our galactic core fore example.
The main canvas of the project is based on our galaxy and their neighbors (Andromeda, the Magellanic clouds..), but also a lot more deep-sky objects like nebulas, star clusters etc… Amateurs and professionals will certainly recognize a multitude of them like the North-American nebula, the Orion nebula, the Rosette nebula, the Carina nebula, the dark horse nebula, the Andromeda galaxy in different situations like photobombed by northern lights or moving behind the tree canopy, the majestic milky way core either rising or in very fine detail moving fleeting gently across the nigh sky… You will still find some wide-angle milky way scenes, because you just cannot pass on them!
My two favorite parts of the project (and the most technically difficult) were shooting the Andromeda galaxy in the aurorae for one, and shooting a scene of the Orion constellation along with its nebulae, including nature and the zodiacal lights for the other. The former was hard to realize because of my location at the time of shoot (Denmark) since we don’t get aurorae too often. I needed to find a calm night (no wind for tracking), with an aurora storm but not too bright either (so one can still see the detail in the galaxy). It also needs to be at that time year when Andromeda passes low on the horizon, coinciding with the space where northern lights would appear. It was the most technical time-lapse I have ever done so far, but the most rewarding! The latter was also difficult, but paid off incredibly well. My goal was to get the red of the emission nebulae in the region of Orion that would still be visible in single pictures of the time-lapse, since you cannot stack and bring out detail! I astro-modified my Canon 6D to get the shot, and included the beautiful zodiacal lights towards the west, and even got a surprise visitor (grey heron) if you can spot it!
I shot a various locations to get a variety of shots: Denmark (northern light, Andromeda, some milky way), Malawi (Milky way core and nebulas), France (star trails), Tenerife (Milky way core and wide-field), Vermont (wide field milky way) and Slovenia (milky way). Since I basically started this project a few years back when I began with astrophotography, some scenes still contain annoying flickering or weren’t as sharp as the ones I get now, but all in all I am truly amazed by the result and I really hope you can appreciate this new view on astro time-lapse. I should mention that this kind of technique demands a lot of work on thinking, preparing, executing and post-processing, and it took me about two years to achieve it.
Material: Canon 6D (Baader modded), Sony a7rII, Sony a7s
Multiple lenses ranging from 10mm to 500mm
iOptron Skyguider tracker Pre-processed in Lr and post-processed in Final Cut Pro X
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Tue May 16, 2017 7:42 pm
by Ian Regan
Voyager 2: An Appointment With Jupiter, King of the Planets
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
My restoration of a sequence captured by Voyager 2 as it bore down on the gas giant in May, 1979.
It has never been seen before in such high quality.
Persistent Meteor Train
Posted: Sat May 20, 2017 1:30 am
by philhart
Just discovered this in a timelapse sequence last month.. an exceptionally persistent meteor train which lasted around an hour and a half before the last remnants were overwhelmed by clouds and morning twilight. Captured looking south over Mount Glasgow (central Victoria, Australia) towards Ballarat on the morning of 8th April 2017.
Each frame here is 20 seconds at ISO3200 on a Canon 5D Mark IV with Samyang 35mm lens at f2.8. Pity about the clouds and Ballarat light pollution.
Phil
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Fri May 26, 2017 6:05 pm
by Adrien Mauduit
2017 Noctilucent clouds chasing season teaser
Credits: Adrien Mauduit
As the Earth continues its path on its elliptical orbit around the sun, high latitudes and higher mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere are entering the midnight sun season. If you go too far up north, the sun never sets, but at lower latitude, like southern Scandinavia, the sun goes down just a few degrees under the horizon and lingers there for a few hours, gliding unnoticed from the north-west to the north-east.
This allows summer nights to remain in a constant twilight and it never gets dark enough to see the milky way or auroras for example.
However this situation, combined with some precise conditions, can give birth to one of the most intriguing and jaw-dropping shows on Earth: noctilucent clouds. While the Earth rotates far away from the sun in the summer, its mesosphere gets cooler, allowing the formation of tiny ice particles. These particle form the highest clouds on our planet (82km in the atmosphere) and wouldn't be visible if it wasn't for the bright nights!
See, the sun being from 0 to 6 degrees under the horizon can, with the help of tropospheric clouds, emit rays that illuminate this ice layer, making the viewer's night sky glow electric blue, yellow and orange!
The Noctilucent cloud (NLC) season roughly starts at the end of May and finishes at the end of July in Denmark. You can gaze upon them when the weather is clear and potentially all night, most likely towards the north as the Sun follows its course under the horizon, back-lighting the ice sheet.
As the 2017 NLC chasing season is about to kick off in Denmark, I assembled some of the best shots of the 2016 season in a 4K time-lapse video as a tribute, and also teaser for the 2017 season, in hope to encourage more and more people to go out and experience these mind-boggling displays.
All shots have been taken in Denmark in 2016 with Sony a7rII and Canon 70D.
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Thu Jun 08, 2017 9:19 am
by Adrien Mauduit
NightSky Ice Ocean - Closer to the noctilucent clouds
Credits: Adrien Mauduit
People and scientists have been eager to study NLC’s for a long time, without really being able to do so (or having the ressources/reasons to). That’s why they are conducting this type of program now, and that’s why they have enjoyed visionning my videos of NLC’s. As I was also trying to get ground-based footage of these intriguing clouds, I always wanted to get closer, using a longer focal length. Below 100mm, the clouds form a magnificent electric-blue glowing sheet against the night sky, which is in itself, something from another world. However, when you switch to longer focal lengths like 300mm or 500mm, you start noticing structures, shapes and behaviors that would totally go unnoticed with the naked eye. I could not believe what I was watching, as I edited the photos from the 500mm raw footage, probably because it had never extensively been done in this way in the past, but also because it reveals how complicated, delicate and sometimes violent NLC’s can actually be. I assume that is the reason why the scientists at PoSSUM got intersted in this kind of imagery, probably because it gave them a sneak peak at what they were going to encounter…
In this movie, almost exclusively shot at 500mm focal length, I assembled a series of 4K time-lapse sequences from the 2016 NLC season, all taken with my Sony a7rII and Canon 70D, and mostly Sigma 150-500mm APO f/5-6.3. I wanted to show that, depending on a lot of unknown conditions and factors, sometimes triggered by teleconnections hundred of kilometers away, NLCs are a genuine ocean of ice in the night sky, either developing gently into a smooth and uniform billowed sheet, or sometimes create large-scale tsunamis when two currents meet. Their wave-like patterns reminds a lot of those produced by water populating our seas or lakes, but who has ever seen an ocean of suspended ice particles in the air? Better yet, who has ever studied their mechanics and behavior, when it doesn’t precisely behave like anything else on Earth on such a large scale? Bands, whirls, pools, troughs, billows, net-like strutures, and blizzard moving on top of the stars like a ghostly veil, that’s a spectacle that more than one will surely enjoy watching up close!
"The Core" - an up close time lapse of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy; our galactic home. The still image after the time lapse was created using a stack of over 40 photos! I'm still amazed at the clarity of the Milky Way!
Shot on a Canon 1DX MK II & Canon 35mm F1.4L II
@F1.4, 13" Exposures, ISO 2000, WB 4300K,
w/ Hoya Red Intensifier
Movie Key features :
- Partial eclipse (outside totality zone)
- The apparent movement of the moon (or the rotation of the moon around the earth)
- The apparent mouvement of the sun (or the movement of the earth around the sun)
Explanation :
On Aug. 21, 2017 people located within the narrow line of totality crossing the USA will experience the magic of a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately most people will have no other choice to see the eclipse outside this tiny aria, where the eclipse will be partial. Even if there is no comparison with what can be seen during totality, a partial solar eclipse remains a rare event that is worth to look at. This movie was taken from Switzerland where the eclipse remained partial during the total solar eclipse that occurred on the Faroe Islands on March 20th, 2015. To take this timelapse, a telescope was very precisely moving to compensate the Earth rotation, pointing a fixed point in the sky. That made possible to see the apparent movement of the moon (or the rotation of the moon around the earth), and the more subtle apparent mouvement of the sun (or the movement of the earth around the sun).
Nicolas Soldati wrote:Dancing Sun, Moon, and Earth (4K movie)
Movie Key features :
- Partial eclipse (outside totality zone)
- The apparent movement of the moon (or the rotation of the moon around the earth)
- The apparent mouvement of the sun (or the movement of the earth around the sun)
Explanation :
On Aug. 21, 2017 people located within the narrow line of totality crossing the USA will experience the magic of a total solar eclipse. Unfortunately most people will have no other choice to see the eclipse outside this tiny aria, where the eclipse will be partial. Even if there is no comparison with what can be seen during totality, a partial solar eclipse remains a rare event that is worth to look at. This movie was taken from Switzerland where the eclipse remained partial during the total solar eclipse that occurred on the Faroe Islands on March 20th, 2015. To take this timelapse, a telescope was very precisely moving to compensate the Earth rotation, pointing a fixed point in the sky. That made possible to see the apparent movement of the moon (or the rotation of the moon around the earth), and the more subtle apparent mouvement of the sun (or the movement of the earth around the sun).
Short timelapse during the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower with a meteor burning up in the atmosphere over Panachaiko mountain in Patras, western Greece. Panachaiko mountain is home to Greece's largest Wind Park with more than 40 Wind Turbines. The meteor shower occurs every July and August as the Earth passes debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. The Perseid shower takes its name from the point in the sky from which the meteors appear to hail: the constellation of Perseus. Named after the mythical Greek hero who defeated the gorgon Medusa by cutting off her snake-covered head, the constellation can be seen in the northern sky.
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2017 2:27 pm
by DianaB
Total Solar Eclipse
29-03-2006
Animation made from 155 photographs taken during the eclipse.
Location: Colakli / Side - Turkey
Date: 29 March 2006
Photography and animation: Diana Bodea
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2017 1:09 pm
by smit
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Grazing Lunar Occultation of Aldebaran
Location: Vologda, Russia.
Date: 16.08.2017.
Credits: Alexander Smirnov, Daniil Vakhrameev
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Mon Aug 21, 2017 3:25 pm
by Adrien Mauduit
Perseid meteor shower over Valais in Switzerland
Credits: Adrien Mauduit
The 2017 Perseid peaked on August 11th but the waning gibbous moon made it hard to see all the small meteorites. Only big ones were visible in the bright sky! I took the shot in the Valais area in Switzerland as I was on vacation with my family from 11:00 pm to 02:11 am (GMT + 1). It was a beautiful scenery and there was barely any light pollution whatsoever: a paradise to shoot pictures in. The mountains of the Valais offer beautiful places with tremendous wildlife and countless things to do. I recommend the place to all nature lovers.
The special shot is the close-upon the Scutum (shield) constellation moving behind the peaks. Can you spot the geostationary satellites as well? I used the Samyang 85 and 135mm to get these shots.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
Re: Video Submissions
Posted: Tue Aug 22, 2017 10:19 am
by Harles99
Totality in 4K! I made the trip from central Texas to Glendo, Wyoming to shoot the Solar Eclipse. Was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
I am unable to figure out how to include a small version of the video so I have attached a single frame of the video of the flash spectrum at third contact.
It shows the transition from the emission lines of the chromosphere to the continuum of the photosphere.
The video is at 25% speed. Cropped from a 4k video made with a 200 lpm grating in front of a Leica D-Lux .
Night Corfu - Angels of Destiny, Music: Real Slow Movement - Angels of Destiny
Stunting Nightscapes in a quick video where in normal speed will pass more than 110,000 photos in front of us!
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
The video is basically a small part of that shots I have taken out in recent years and I hope to publish them. In general, it came out with a lot of effort and sacrifices, since the day I had to be at work and in the evening to photograph, quite a hitchhiker, misfortune, but also many positive moments.
Perhaps the intensity of the video shows exactly what my daily routine is. I do not know it is yours but I am in tension and pressure and I always reach the limits.
It is this passion for stars and the Celestial objects with me pushing me to photograph something more!
I think the culmination in the video is my little niece Konstantina, where her mom and dad's hands touch the dream. It touches the Full Moon even seemingly through the telescope of the Astronomical Society of Corfu.
It is interesting to note how the size of the Moon changes according to the telescope's focal length. There is no editing in any picture, everything is as it came out of the camera. Just the telescope gets bigger. Of course this requires a lot of trigonometry, since even 5 meters wrong in setting the telescope (about 60 kg weight) the target has gone out of the frame.
It is worthwhile to see some brilliant Persons in some places, although they go very fast at 00:46, dropping three punches almost simultaneously. as in 00:59 but on the albums you can see them much better. Naturally very easy to see the fire at 01:06 and immediately after another a small punching. Still 01:09, 01:42 Another 3 punters.
At 01:38 I did not have anything to do at night as the camera photographed and I did circles with the lens, maybe two more hours to take this.
-The pink clouds at 01:43 are hearts!
-Castellos at 01:38 have been filmed scenes from Corfu's Day
-The Cedar forrest in Issos is a protected area in the Korission lagoon, the sand dune is so many, where in the photograph later came clouds of lightning and I was looking to find which dune I left the camera
-The islets in Apotrypitis the locals call them Capases because they are very beautiful.
-The blue light in the sea at Ortholithi is two divers!
-On 02:23 is the Omega of the Centaur above the Chalikounas Sea.
-The 2:51 minute 4K final video is 40GB in size
-The total picture files for this video are 166.453 and are 2.04TB in size (jpg not the Raw from which they were exported)
- Overall I have to stay over 3 years more than 400 nights! The most extreme cases I can sleep on the rocks at the edge of the cliff with -4 ° C or on the branches of a cedar on a rock and below the gap.
-The traces in the night sky are the orbits of the stars, not the punctured. Close to the polar circles, while at sunrise and west almost straight lines.
-Bright landscapes in the evening are due to the Moon. The most beautiful light for Nightscape we usually have when it's in Fourth. Most shots are 30sec, iso800, f / 2.8.
