Milky Way Time Lapse Movie, Photo

Milky Way Time Lapse Movie

Filed under: Death Valley, National Parks, Time Lapse, Video on 5/18/2010

This is a time lapse video of the Milky Way rising in the south east sky, viewed from Death Valley. The Milky Way is our own galaxy, a thick spinning disc of stars with arms that thin as they spiral outward. Our Sun is located in one of the arms. When viewed from our Sun’s location, the Milky Way is viewed “on edge” and so appears as a broad band across the sky. The Milky Way is not aligned with the plane of the ecliptic, so it is not parallel with the paths that the moon and Sun follow across our sky. The central core of the Milky Way, which is the thick disc-like center of the galaxy, lies on the right side of this video. Some satellites and planes can be seen briefly in the video, along with a few shooting stars (meteors) near the bottom of the frame just before dawn. This was shot with two Canon digital SLR cameras over a period of about six hours, and is composed of about 500 photographs.

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18 Comments »

cool Phil - I’ll have to play with soem,thing like this in a few weeks wehn I’m in central Australia - nice!

Comment by Iain Williams — 5/18/2010 @ 10:29 pm
Phil,
Thanks for that visual treat, a magnificent use of the camera, the sky and the video feature. I liked it even more than your antarctica stuff. The darkness in Alaska is gone until late August now, so the relentless sun will bear down and steal that wonderful night sky. But, the sun has its benefits also. What lens and exposure did you use?

Comment by Patrick Endres — 5/18/2010 @ 10:57 pm
Thanks for your kind words, Iain.

Patrick, I used a 1DsIII and 5DII bodies, with 15mm fisheye and 24mm lenses, on two successive nights. I need to work on the color, it is hard to get it to look correct. Another fellow was using a D700 / 14-24 and his images looked very nice, I think that rig would be a better choice for Milky Way photos. Exposures were f/2.8, ISO 3200, 30 seconds with a dark frame subtraction for each image. Images were processed in batch using Lightroom III, assembled into a time lapse in Quicktime Pro, and slapped into a movie with titles using iMovie. Cheers, Phil

Comment by Phil — 5/18/2010 @ 11:56 pm
I have been a silent reader of your blog for a while now, but these videos are so beautiful I had to break the silence! Thank you for sharing such a wonderful view of our galaxy.

Comment by Samantha — 5/19/2010 @ 7:08 am
Awesome, Phil!

Comment by Garry McCarthy — 5/19/2010 @ 10:36 am
Samantha, Garry — thanks. Garry, as you know, it was a fun video to make!

Comment by Phil — 5/19/2010 @ 11:26 am
That is really cool! I have been enjoying your time-lapse videos. I have shot a few, but have never put them together - what software are you using for this?

Comment by Ron Niebrugge — 5/19/2010 @ 11:52 am
Ron, here’s what I do. I shoot the images in RAW. In this case I also used “long exposure noise reduction”, but that cuts the number of frames I can shoot in half. (Some people shoot a single “dark frame” and then manually subtract that in Photoshop later, but that sounds like too much work for me.) Import the images into Lightroom. Go to an image in the middle of the sequence and determine best raw processing settings, then “sync-apply” those same settings to all the images. The results are exported as 1920×1080 jpegs to a single folder. Point Quicktime Pro to that folder and it assembles them into an HD video (.mov) file that looks really amazing on my Mac. That movie is opened in iMovie, I slap some simple titles and transitions on it, then upload it directly from iMovie to Youtube using the “720 HD” option for YouTube uploads. That’s it. It is surprisingly simple, it took perhaps 15-20 minutes from downloading the raw files off my CF card to uploading to YouTube, and much of that was the batch raw processing.

Comment by Phil — 5/19/2010 @ 11:59 am
This came out great Phil. I have a time lapse or two from Death Valley to put together still, but I’m not sure it will look as sharp as this. inspiring work.

Comment by Jim Goldstein — 5/19/2010 @ 12:05 pm
Thanks Jim. I realized how important clear skies for something like this. Its really pushing what these cameras can record, but when the conditions are clear enough, modern digital cameras can really pull a lot out of the night sky. Based on what I saw of the D700 and 14-24 that was on our trip, that would be the ideal rig night sky photography.

Comment by Phil — 5/19/2010 @ 12:17 pm
Yeah, well, if that *^%#*@ D700 guy had a longer-lasting battery (and perhaps had remembered to turn off LCD display of each time-lapse photo as it was taken), he might have a nice time-lapse also! :-)

Example of a Milky Way shot on the D700 plus Nikkor 14-24/2.8 that Phil has been talking about:
http://johnhmoore.com/Milky-Way.jpg

ISO 3200, f/2.8, 30 seconds. ISO 2000 is a little less noisy, but ISO 3200 has better color in the Milky Way.

Comment by John H. Moore — 5/19/2010 @ 1:34 pm
Thanks Phil!

Comment by Ron Niebrugge — 5/19/2010 @ 4:25 pm
Hi guys, a couple of questions if you don’t mind.
Phil, did you find the dark frame subtraction to be worth the trade off in number of frames? Did you apply any noise reduction in LR3?
John, I have a D700 too and thinking about shooting some similar photos on Maui next month. I know Hana will have more moisture and probably not as dark as DV, but there is also Haleakala. I’ll shoot either a 15mm fisheye and or a 20mm prime at f/2.8. How long do you figure a single battery would have lasted for you, best case? What do you think of shooting at f/1.4 or f/1.8 (50mm or 85mm), tho obviously these aren’t wide angle. Getting below 30 seconds should increase sharpness, yes?
Any other tips??

Comment by Paul Cunningham — 5/23/2010 @ 11:36 pm
Paul - yes, I found it to be worthwhile. I’d rather have the camera do the work (reducing the noise) than trying to do a “manual” dark frame subtraction later in post processing through some Photoshop action or other method.

As for Haleakala — my hunch is that you will have clearer skies atop Haleakala than in Hana. In fact, you may find that the summit of Haleakala is above any cloud layer. At least, that is what I have observed on the many occasions I have been atop Haleakala. Reducing your exposure time much below 30 sec will not net much sharpness, in fact, it may cause problems if your image is underexposed and you have to increase it in post with the resultant noise increase. 30 seconds with a fisheye is short enough to get reasonably sharp stars for my purposes. f/1.4 or f/1.8 would be better in terms of decreasing necessary exposure time, but are those lenses tack sharp wide open? Also, what would you shoot with those focal lengths? If you want the Milky Way, you aren’t going to get the whole thing with those lenses. Based on my limited experience shooting Milky Way photos, I think 15mm - 24mm is the focal range I will use in the future. Aloha, Phil

Comment by Phil — 5/24/2010 @ 12:08 am
Phil, thanks for the answer, all good things to think about. Did you experiment with exposures greater than 30 seconds?
John, I’m curious if you used “long exposure NR” during shooting, or any post processing with the image you posted?
Thanks, Paul

Comment by Paul Cunningham — 5/24/2010 @ 6:31 pm
Paul, yes, I did try exposures longer than 30 seconds. Its all a matter of taste as to how much elongation of the stars you are willing to tolerate. The longer the exposure, the more oblong the stars become. The shorter the exposure, the more pinpoint they are. Its a tradeoff. Of course, the wider the lens, the less elongation of the an individual star is observed since each star occupies a relatively smaller part of the frame. For images that are part of an assemblage, such as a time lapse or a stacked image, you can go longer since blurring of the stars is not a problem. But for a single image in which sharp stars are important, 30 seconds is the longest exposure time I will use. I’m pretty sure John used NR during his exposures (would be crazy not to use it given that it can be very beneficial in high-ISO exposures) and in general some contrast enhancement is required to pull out the best milky way image from the raw files.

Comment by Phil — 5/24/2010 @ 6:43 pm
Hi Phil, first thank you for your inspiring post and helpful comments. A few days ago I shot the Milky Way from the top of Haleakala using a 20mm f/2.8, a 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, and an 85mm f/1.8 (D700). I’m quite happy with the results, you can see them here: http://www.veryCunning.com/stardust. Of course always room for improvement… comments and critiques invited.

With the 85mm I was surprised at the appearance of star trails at 30 seconds, even though I knew to expect them. I don’t think I would hesitate to shoot at ISO 6400+ next time (and speed up the shutter) as Lightroom 3 does an amazing job with noise now. Thanks again and best wishes! Paul

Comment by Paul Cunningham — 6/18/2010 @ 10:56 am
Wow - beautiful timelapse, and truly exquisite captures! That color is just astounding.
I tried out my first timelapse with a 5D MKII just two nights ago - had no idea what I was doing, but got lucky. I’d only been shooting starfields/milky way for about two nights total…had never done it before, so was just trying different exposures till it worked.
So far, I’m pretty happy with the Long Exposure Noise Reduction built into the 5DMKII, and then LR3 is doing a great job as well at cleaning up anything else. Where I live, with all the ambient light from the cities 20-40 miles away it’s not as crisp and colorful as yours….but I was doing ISO1600, 30s, f/2.8 with a 15mm fisheye, and 3s intervals between shots…. so it took in a lot of light pollution from the horizon lines in both directions…

But! Even though I’d been shooting for four hours doing other crazy stuff, at about 1:45am when I set up the timelapse the clouds started rolling in….and halfway through my first attempt, the lens fogged up. Any suggestions on how to keep that from happening? It hadn’t fogged for the four previous hours, but of course I leave it unattended for one, and it fogs up after a halfhour. First try is here: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/video/video.php?v=408587887841&ref=mf

Excellent work, BTW. :)

Did you do anything to get richer “black” in the skies? Because at half the light (being at 1600 instead of your 3200) exposure, I’m getting the sky all blown out and not a very nice dark/black background… Suggestions?

Kind Regards!
Joe

Comment by Joe Menth — 7/19/2010 @ 7:10 pm

Milky Way Time Lapse Movie, Natural History Photography Blog

Milky Way Time Lapse Movie

18 Comments »