Shoot a stunning time-lapse video of the Milky Way, and there’s a good chance it’ll go viral. Photographer Randy Halverson used a Canon 60D and Canon T2i with Tokina 11-16, Sigma 20mm F1.8, and Tamron 17-50 lenses to shoot these beautiful images of the night sky over South Dakota.
Shot in RAW format, the Milky Way shots were 30 seconds exposure F2.8 or F1.8 with 2 second interval between shots, for 3-4 hours run time. ISO 1600
Ten seconds of the video is about 2 hours 20 minutes in real time.
Also be sure to check out Terje Sorgjerd’s time-lapse of the Milky Way above Spain if you haven’t already.
What you see above is the largest true-color photograph of the night sky ever created, shot by 28-year-old amateur astrophotographer Nick Risinger using six astronomical cameras. It’s not just the view of the sky from one location, but is instead a 360-panoramic view of the sky taken by trekking 60,000 miles across the western United States and South Africa starting in March 2010. The final image is composed of 37,000 separate photographs. Check out the massive zoomable high-definition version of the photo here.
Terje Sorgjerd is a master of out-of-this-world timelapse videos. After stunning all of us with one featuring the northern lights earlier this year, he’s back again with an even crazier one that captures the Milky Way over El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain. The individual frames were shot using a Canon 5D Mark II with a Canon 17mm TSE, Canon 16-35mm II, Canon 24/1.4II, and Sigma 12-24mm.
This is a stunning time-lapse video of an entire night at the ALMA Array Operations Site in Chile (the largest astronomical project in existence). The antennas point at the same part of the sky at any given moment, so their movements are perfectly synchronized. If you think watching a sunset is beautiful, wait till you see our galaxy come into view in this video.
P.S. This video could do with music. We recommend playing some Sigur Ros in the background while watching this.
Last week we featured a stunning time-lapse video that unfortunately failed to capture Perseid meteor shower well because of too much air traffic in the area. Landscape photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee attempted the same kind of video in Joshua Tree National Park. Even though there’s still quite a bit of air traffic, you can clearly see quite a few shooting stars that light up the sky.
Regarding the issue of shooting stars being so brief in a time-lapse video (an issue that arose in the comments of our previous post), Lee writes in the Vimeo comments:
Each of the meteors only last 1 frame but with so many during the meteor shower, it looks like a lot going on. Wide aperture also makes the trails look wider/more visible. And I angle the lens so that it picks up as much of the trail as possible when a meteor goes across the sky. In this case, I pointed away from the source direction. So you see longer streaks. I only use 1 second intervals between exposures for smooth motion.
The photos were shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and EF 16-35mm L lens at f/2.8, ISO6400, and 20 second exposures. There’s also the obligatory Sigur Ros music accompanying the video.
