nightsky

When you think night sky time-lapse, what are the first places that come to mind? Probably somewhere in Iceland, maybe a few spots in Hawaii, but one location that probably doesn't make the list is the country of Kazakhstan.

No, it's not just a punchline from the movie Borat. As photographer Denis Frantsouzov shows you in the mesmerizing time-lapse video above, it's also one of the best places to go if you want to capture the night sky.

Five months after releasing his first tutorial video on shooting and processing time-lapse photography, Dustin Farrell is back at it again. This time he's gone more in depth, featuring some behind the scenes of his nighttime time-lapse workflow, from the gear he uses (and suggests) to the actual creation process of the video.

Bob Avakian and his wife Gail visited Martha’s Vineyard for the summer in 1973, and it has been home ever since. Trained in architecture, engineering and building, for years he has worked in the construction field as a custom homebuilder. After finding himself in management, removed from the satisfaction of hands-on involvement, he turned to photography as a means of self-expression.

As his photographic vision has evolved he has been drawn to the natural landscape and an exploration of night photography.

When you think of the Jersey Shore what are the first things that come to mind? The beach? The ocean? The amusement park rides? Summer? But there is one sight that goes completely unnoticed by so many shore goers each and every year in the town of Cape May. That sight is the night sky!

When we see video of the Milky Way, it's usually not video per se -- more often than not it's a time-lapse. That's because the exposure time needed to capture the Milky Way in most situations makes shooting a standard video a challenge. One production company decided that technology had advanced far enough to give it a try though, and what they came up with was quite cool.

When it comes to visible light photos of the night sky, Hubble has been king. That's because Earth-bound telescopes -- even those with much higher-quality optical systems than Hubble -- must deal with the blurring effects of our planet's atmosphere.

A newly developed camera called VisAO, however, has done away with that problem, and in the process enabled astronomers to take the highest-resolution visible light photos ever captured of the night sky.

Long exposure photographs of stars and romantic engagement photographs aren't often found together, but that's the fusion wedding photography couple Robert Paetz and Felicia Wong have been dabbling with as of late. The duo takes their clients out into natural landscapes away from light-polluted cities and photographs them under the night sky. They call the resulting photos, "astro wedding photography."

If you've never attempted to photograph the night sky, be it a constellation or a planet, the idea may seem daunting. You may think that you need a specific type of camera or that you need to invest in a high-quality telescope.

While those things can be true in certain situations, astronomer Mark Thompson takes a minute in the video above to show you how to capture great photos of the night sky using very little in way of equipment.

Check out this aurora photograph captured last Friday night by photographer Mike Hollingshead. See those small red squiggly lines in the sky? That's an extremely rare form of lightning called a sprite. This photograph is one of the only times a sprite and an aurora have been captured in the same frame.

For over a year now, photographer Shawn Stockman Malone of LakeSuperiorPhoto has been pointing her cameras at the sky over Michigan's Lake Superior and capturing dazzling displays of the Northern Lights.

Ever see those pictures where the stars streak across the sky in a big arc? Or maybe the whole sky looked like it was spinning? What you saw was star trails. The streaks were light left behind on the sensor or film from the star as it traveled across the sky in front of an open camera shutter. In fact, what are being recorded are stationary stars and the rotation of the earth as it spins past them. For me, the images seem to have a certain magic or mystery about them.

You must have heard a photographer talking about capturing that perfect moment in time. Well for capturing star trails you will need to capture the perfect hour or two in time. For such amazing looking images, the technique used to capture them is really quite simple. Keep reading for a complete set of instructions from start to finish.

Some people have been asking for tips on how to do star trails. There seems to be a few misconceptions and a few different methods. Here's a tutorial on my personal technique.

On Friday, February 15th, 2013, near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 did a flyby of our planet -- the closest approach ever of an object of its size (30 meters in diameter). Photographer Colin Legg of Western Australia decided to capture the close pass in a time-lapse video, and set up his cameras after midnight around 220 miles east of Perth.

He ended up capturing the amazing video above, while captures a shooting star burning a trail across the sky while DA14 slowly travels through the shot. The video also shows how much random stuff in the sky you can see if you have eyes/cameras sensitive enough to see it.

Walkthroughs of photographs that aren't easily reproducible (or are impossible to reproduce) might not be very useful to many, but it's still interesting to learn how rare shots come about. An example would be the photograph above, captured by photographer Bryan Hanna last week. Hanna was aiming to capture a long-exposure nighttime photograph of a landscape in the foreground and the night sky in the background, but he accidentally snagged something even better: a fireball zipping across the sky in just the right area in the frame!

What would the world's major cities look like if they were plunged into complete darkness? Some photographers gave us a taste of it when New York City suffered major power outages during Hurricane Sandy, but those scenes were coupled with an overcast sky.

After seeing the story of the DSLR-stealing lion that we published last night, Zurich, Switzerland-based photographer Alessandro Della Bella sent in an unusual camera theft story of his own. While shooting time-lapse photographs of the night sky using three intervalometer-trigger DSLRs, one of the cameras was stolen by a thief. What's interesting is that the camera documented the whole event through time-lapse photos! The video above shows the time-lapse that resulted.

We've shared plenty of gorgeous time-lapse videos of the night sky and "tiny world" images, but what do you get when you combine the two concepts? French photographer Stephane Vetter shows us with the video above, titled "Leonid and Zodiacal Light."

Photographer Brad Goldpaint started his journey in photography just three years ago, but you'd never guess that from watching this impressive time-lapse effort, titled "Within Two Worlds." Goldpaint writes,

Within Two Worlds depicts an alternate perspective by giving us the illusion of times movement, signifying a beginning and end within a world of constant contradiction. It appears you are traveling in the midst of a dream, half-sleeping, half-waking, and touching the arch connecting heaven and earth.

I discovered my passion for photography shortly after my mother’s passing while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) 3 years ago. This time-lapse video is my visual representation of how the night sky and landscapes co-exist within a world of contradictions. I hope this connection between heaven and earth inspires you to discover and create your own opportunities, to reach your rightful place within two worlds.

North Carolina-based photographer Daniel Lowe sent us the gorgeous video above, which shows star trails forming and floating across the sky. Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show stars as points of light, rotating around Earth's pole. Lowe's video shows the long streaks of star trails doing the rotating, making the video even more surreal and magical.

Capturing a single shooting star can make for a brilliant photograph, but what does it look like if you composite multiple meteors into a single image? Fort Collins, Colorado-based nature photographer David Kingham decided to find out recently during the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. The amazing photo seen above is what resulted.

What would photographs of the night sky look like if other planets in our solar system replaced the Moon? …

NASA astronomers announced today that they are certain that our galaxy is on an unavoidable collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest spiral galaxy to us. Don't worry though, it won't be happening for another 3.5 billion years or so. What's interesting is that the collision will drastically change what our night sky looks like, and the astronomers released a series of photo illustrations showing what future astrophotographers will be shooting when they point their cameras at the heavens.

Photographer Shane Murphy has written up an …

This past Sunday, Jupiter and Venus put on a show by lining up with our moon (a …

This photo is what you get when you point a massive 4.1 meter telescope (VISTA in Chile) at an unremarkable patch of night sky and capture six thousand separate exposures that provide an effective "shutter speed" of 55 hours. It's an image that contains more than 200,000 individual galaxies, each containing countless stars and planets (to put the image into perspective, the famous Hubble Ultra-Deep Field contains "only" around 10,000 galaxies). And get this: this view only shows a tiny 0.004% of the entire sky!

NASA has released a gigantic catalog of …

"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.

Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson (whose time-lapse of lightning storms we featured …

Swedish photographer Göran Strand created this amazing "little planet" photo (AKA a stereographic projection) that shows the Aurora Borealis overhead. He titled it "Planet Aurora".

Babak Tafreshi of The World at Night …