Here’s an 8K, 360° Video of a Lunar Eclipse with the Northern Lights

Back on January 31st, photographer William Briscoe set up his cameras near Fairbanks, Alaska, and shot this awe-inspiring 360-degree interactive video of a lunar eclipse in the sky above the dancing green glow of the Northern Lights.

“It was a challenging night due to the temperatures,” Briscoe writes. His primary focus during the eclipse was getting his time-lapse 360° camera rig (custom-built out of multiple DSLRs) operating correctly, as it was a frigid -31°F (~-35°C) that night during the 3-hour shoot.

The extreme dynamic range of this project also required Briscoe to pull out some digital trickery: the video is actually a composite created with images captured by two different camera rigs at the scene.

“The difference between the settings required to properly expose the moon and the Aurora is too great to do it in a single shot,” Briscoe says. “The 360 camera was set to expose the aurora and landscape, while a second camera attached to a telephoto lens was used to time lapse the lunar eclipse itself. I combined them in post.”

If Briscoe hadn’t composited the two drastically different exposures, the moon would have appeared as a white dot in the sky even during the eclipse’s totality.

(via William Briscoe via DPReview)