This is a still frame of my first attempt at a timelapse of the night sky. This was taken at my go-to place for star photography, Porteau Cove Provincial Park.
The 20 second video can be found on Youtube, and absolutely needs to be viewed full-screen and in HD. It should default to 720p resolution, but if you have a good computer, I'd recommend increasing it to 1080p resolution using the cog at the bottom-right of the Youtube player:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c15UWG_Wzws&hd=1
Although it was a beautifully clear night, there was rather too much moon for my typical photography of the Milky Way. The moon provided plenty of light to illuminate the landscape, however. After taking a few still shots, I set the camera up at ISO 2500, f/3.5, taking 30 second exposures. Making sure that dark frame noise cancellation was off so that I didn't get gaps between the shots, I then locked the shutter release open and waited!
The video was created from 384 shots taken over a three and a half hour period between 9:45pm on the 20th January and 1:15am on the 21st January. As my largest card is 8GB, I set the quality to MRAW, which was still more than high enough to convert to 1920x1080 resolution.
At the end of the three and a half hours, the card was full and the battery was down to 10%, so that worked out pretty well!
All shots were processed in Adobe Camera Raw (which provides the same options as Lightroom), cropped to 16:9 ratio, and resized to 1920x1080. No further processing was done.
As this was my first timelapse of this type, I expected it to be mostly a learning exercise. If I were doing it again, I would be looking to increase the ISO and reduce the shutter speed to 10 seconds. This would give me three times the number of photographs over the same time period, and hence a video that was three times longer!
Things to watch for include the traffic on the Sea to Sky highway at the bottom right, a couple of aircraft flying overhead, the clouds coming in from the west, and the shadow cast by the moon shifting on the nearby structure as well as on the snow on the distant mountains.
I did try combining the shots into a trail photograph, but it didn't seem to 'pop', I think because there was too much light in the sky from the moon.
John's original comment follows:
You should take the part of the video before the clouds come in and turn it into a star trails shot too...
Very nicely done. Definitely the high resolution is required. It's so interesting (yet predictable, I guess) that the moon reflecting the sunlight can light up the ground as if it's full daylight, given a long enough exposure. I tried to make one of these a couple weeks ago but for some reason my intervalometer decided to stop working about an hour in and it wasn't worth starting over.
FAV!