Want to know what an astro timelapse looks like? Want to see some impressive ones? Here you go:

After watching those and many more I decided to try recreating some of this beauty or at least just a fragment of it.

Most of the astro timelapses these days are captured with DSLR still cameras together with an intervalometer. I own a Canon 350D, but I still don’t have an intervalometer so I searched for an alternative way. I found that there is a hacked firmware for the 350D which includes a basic intervalometer function. Managed to install it succesfully and I was ready to fly in the time lapse heaven.

I spent some time in Timescapes forum, which I recomend to everyone interested in to timelapse, and after I learned some theory I just had to wait for a clear night.

Since this was my first try I decided to shoot from my window and not go outside the town where the results could be MUCH better. Remember that light pollution is a big enemy of the astro photographers, so if you want impressive results and have the chance, better go far away from the city!

I have only a 50mm, f 1.4 Canon lense so I was limited to 6 second exposures. After the sixth second the stars became lines. So a fast wide lense is the way to go if you want more panoramic looking astro timelapse.
I set the ISO to 400 and the aperture to f2.8. The focus needed some tweaking because it seems that the infinity sign doesn’t give the sharpest results when it comes to stars. I had to set it a bit before the mark.
After the test images I set the intervalometer to take 450 shots with 6 seconds intervals between them. With all set and running I went to sleep with hopes for the best

When I woke up in the morning all was done, even the battery had some juice in it.

I shot in RAW and this gave me the chance to edit the white balance easily. After that I exported the files as jpeg’s (not sure if this is the best you can do) and with the help ot Sony Vegas I put all images together as a video file.

As you will see in the final video I got some flickering going on. I think this was caused by the city lights, but it might be an aperture flicker too. So next time I am going out of the city and will lock the aperture too (see how).

So here is the result. Again, it is not even close to the videos in the begining of the post, but I hope I will get better with the time. If you want to watch in HD you must see it in Vimeo.
Not sure why, but Vimeo compressed my original file from 40MB to 5MB and this altered the quality.

All comments are welcome,

Thanks!

Hey guys,

This is my first post here. Since English is not my native language please accept my apologies for the writing and grammar mistakes I will make. This is one of the reasons I created this site, to practice!

After watching some very inspirational and visually stunning time lapses from Philip Bloom and Co I decided to try creating one by myself.

I did a research. What I needed was a camera and an intervalometer. Since I have a Canon 350D, but I don’t have an intervalometer, I searched for an alternative way. I discovered that the camera module on my Nokia E55 has a sequence mode which allows me to capture a picture every 10 seconds. The quality of E55’s camera is not good in general, but this was my only option. One good thing is that it has a fixed focus so I was not worried about getting a lot of unfocused pictures during the time lapse sequence.

The next “problem” was “What to shoot?”. For good or bad, on the other side of the street where I work, there is a major bus stop. A lot of movement … and noise. They would be my target.

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