Astro Timelapse I

[davidc]

Another timelapse video, this time of the evening skies above Thetford in Norfolk. Flickr has unfortunately introduced blockiness into the opening seconds and I sadly ran out of battery after only a couple of hours but I'm still pleased it worked.

The images for this were bulk edited in ACR to remove the worst of the light pollution (most visible on the clouds) but you can also see the impact of my broken 10-22 lens... the bottom half of the frame is noticeably less sharp than the top half so I think I'll need to find a local repairman to fix it in time for my next holiday.

Things of interest are the milky way near the top of the frame (moving out of shot), a particularly bright meteor early on (the individual frame will likely be my 365 shot for the day) with another fainter one later. Not to mention 2 or 3 airplanes, numerous hot pixels on my sensor (or perhaps geosynchronous satellites, I need to check their locations to be sure) and best of all the Andromeda galaxy. Barely visible at the beginning, it's a fuzzy blob that is nearing the centre of the image with about 5 seconds to go - imagine the image as a clock face, it's at about the 8.30 mark. This is our nearest galactic neighbour at 2.5 million light years distant. I've been trying to get a snap of it for ages but London is particularly crappy in terms of light pollution and has always thwarted me! The Pleiades open star cluster just sneaks into the bottom left hand corner in the last couple of frames too.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cedarsphot ... likes_hd=1

Once I get the chance to go to a dark sky site in the UK I want to try this again with some interesting foreground

[Paul Heester]

Excellent work David. I gather you have a mount/rig/thingie that moves the camera around? There are some amazing timelapse videos nowadays all because of DSLRs and peoples persistence in spending hours in the dark and then hoping once they are home it all recorded correctly

You mentioned dark skies, so you may be interested in this link - http://www.avex-asso.org/dossiers/pl/uk/index.html - which shows light pollution in the UK. Im already scouting locations for the autumn when it gets darker earlier.

[davidc]

Actually no - if I had one of those then it would move with the sky and the scene would stay motionless. You use those for really really long exposure shots I cover parts of this in my astrophotography presentation.

This is just sitting the camera on the inlaw's patio table looking up! I tried it the night before with adaptive shutter speed so it would do 30 sec exposures in the middle of the night and gradually get faster as the sun came up and not do 30 sec exposures that would just give white frames. That was sadly out of focus and I also encountered a bizarre issue when the inlaw's security light came on, confused the metering and after that all subsequent images were underexposed, badly. Very annoying, and a waste of battery.

So to get around that I set the settings manually (30 secs, f3 and iso 1600 if memory serves) and set it just pointing upwards so the lights going on and off wouldn't reflect off trees or other nearby houses. Doesn't look too bad for a first effort

[davidc]

That map is cool, albeit extremely depressing. It shows what I suspected, namely even "remote" places in the south are still not properly dark skies. I've been talking to Simon Clarkson about some nearby sites outside of the M25 and there is also the observatory at Kenley which can get reasonable results too (the trees shield most of the direct pollution).

I tried this in Scotland and ended up with 90 seconds of partially clear skies. Stupid weather.