More nocturnal photos

[Pyro Pete]

After the chinese lanterns I tried a star trails photo, had been experimenting with settings for this a little while ago. With film you just open the shutter for a few hours but you can't do that with digital because of noise. So you just take hundreds of consecutive photos, in this case about 240 over two hours, then combine them in a technique called "stacking":



This might be useful for fireworks too, if you had a series of images each with some fireworks in different parts, to combine them into one better shot (I'll try this and upload the results).

I also put the star images together to create a 15 second time lapse sequence, attached, you can see the odd jet fly over plus bellows of smoke from chimneys as people put logs on their fires, as well as the rotation of the earth as the stars move around the pole star. It's exactly the same images as from the still, but in sequence.

Need to buy some electic heated socks now.

[Andy_P]

Cool! My dad did some star trails on film with me when I was a kid. Really makes you realise how fast we're all spinning!
Just love that animation!

[RocketRev]

Now that I like a lot - both the stacked photo and the time lapse video.

Too much light pollution where I am to try it..... but there are places I can get to that'd be OK.

I tried some night sky photography a couple of years ago using some noise removal methods, but not nearly as effective as that stacking. But then I was only looking for a few minutes of photography to get pin point star constellations. I did consider getting my 35mm film SLR out for that sort of night work. (Couldn't at the time - I was on holiday and only had the digital camera with me.)

[meggsy]

Whats that big wide beam of light that crosses right to left early in the animation? its about 12 oclock at 3 secs...gotta try this at some point

[ambientskies]

Very cool film... Nice one Pete, center- North Star?

17miles per second per second - Vangelis Albedo 0.39 Planetarium laser show's in the 80's

[RocketRev]

Ah, Vangelis...... got the CD.

[Andy_P]

Originally Posted by ambientskies

Planetarium laser show's in the 80's

I was there... One of my best "first date" venues

[Venger]

Fantastic Pete, really fantastic

[phazefireworks]

Great pic there Pete i wonder if it would work with the Northern lights.

[Zedsquared]

Another plus vote for the Planetarium laser shows, the Dark Side of the Moon show was fantastic.... audio was off a 1st gen copy of the album mixdown master tapes by all accounts, great stuff

Longish (30-60sec) exposure works for bringing out the colour in northern lights but too long and the swirliness smears out all the patterns and you just get green blobs. Here's a 30 second exposure: noisy as hell as the ISO was cranked right up too:

Cheers,
Robin.