For his project “Cloud Collection“, photographer Rüdiger Nehmzow went about four miles off the ground and photographed clouds through the open door of the plane. With no glass between Nehmzow and the sky to muddy up the shots, the resulting photographs are absolutely stunning.
Photos after the break

Photographer Mike Rosinski created this amazing image showing light trails from both fireflies and stars by stacking over 370 photos shot over 2 hours from his backyard in Hartland, Michigan. He used a Canon T1i and 15-85mm lens at 15mm with 20 second exposures. The stacking was done with StarStaX, a free program geared towards star trail photography. You can find more about Mike Rosinski’s work (prints, licensing fees, etc) by contacting him here.

(via APOD)

Image credit: Photograph by Mike Rosinski and used with permission

Photographer Elias Politis created this beautiful image showing the June 15 lunar eclipse over the Acropolis in Athens, Greece by shooting a time-lapse video and then combining the stills into a single frame.
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Chris Kotsiopoulos of GreekSky created this mind-boggling panoramic photo of the sky that shows the passing of a day. He writes,

You can read about his process and some challenges he faced here. Kotsiopoulos is also the photographer behind the beautiful stacked lightning photograph we featured a while back.

Image credit: Photograph by Chris Kotsiopoulos and used with permission

If you love both traveling and photography, a fun photo project might be to shoot through a checklist of atmospheric phenomena. You probably know about auroral lights, but have you heard of parhelia, aka sun dogs? These are bright spots of light in the sky, often seen on a bright halo around the sun when it’s low in the sky.
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Last night there was a total lunar eclipse that just so happened to coincide with the Winter solstice. If you missed the eclipse in person, University of Floria professor and photographer William Castleman created this beautiful time-lapse video with photographs he captured from Gainesville, Florida.

(via Laughing Squid)

If you live in an urban area, you probably don’t see the night sky very clearly due to light pollution. Luckily, there’s videos like this one to remind us how beautiful the sky above is when there aren’t artificial lights drowning out the stars. This is a high-definition time-lapse of the Milky Way floating across the sky.

Warning: this might inspire you to learn more about time-lapse and astrophotography.

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.

This breathtaking timelapse was created by Tom Lowe of Timescapes, showing footage from his first film, “Southwest Light”. We love how camera movement adds another epic dimension to the footage, as if the stars spinning in the expanse overhead isn’t enough. If you have a minute and a half to spare, definitely take a look at this video.

A History of the Sky is an ambitious project by San Francisco-based artist Ken Murphy that aims to create a gigantic mosaic of 365 time-lapse videos of the sky – one for each day of the year.

Time-lapse movies are compelling because they give us a glimpse of events that are continually occurring around us, but at a rate normally far too slow to for us to observe directly. A History of the Sky enables the viewer to appreciate the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen.

Currently a work in process, Murphy uses a camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium in San Francisco to capture a photograph of the sky every 10 seconds. The photographs from each day are then combined into a 6-minute time-lapse movie.

Once the project is complete, the 365 time-lapse movies will be combined into a mosaic, with each of the movies playing in parallel. Since the time of day in each movie is the same across all the movies, the viewer is able to see the graduate shifting of sunset and sunrise times.

To get a sneak peek of what the final result will be like, check out this video created with 126 days:

Murphy’s next step is to build a display for the project using a set of HD monitors arranged side by side.

I want viewers to be able to stand back and observe the atmospheric phenomena of an entire year in just a few minutes, or approach the piece to focus on a particular day.

If you’d like to support his efforts, he’s created a project on Kickstarter to raise funds for this display.