A short night sky time-lapse GIF-a-mation

Last night the power was out for over four hours in West Dover. After I used up the last of the energy in my UPS unit I had to find something else to do with the evening.

Since the power was off in the village the street lights were off as well. This created an interesting opportunity for some excellent wintertime backyard astronomy.

I used a flashlight to locate my camera gear and tripod. Once I had my tripod set up outside I changed the lens on my Canon DSLR camera to an 8mm Peleng circular fisheye lens. The Peleng lens is a lot of fun because it takes extremely wide angle photos. I set my Canon D60 camera to bulb mode and programmed my Canon TC80-N3 intervalometer to capture 90 second long exposures. In all I ran the camera for 45 minutes in the cold weather and captured 28 long exposure images before the batteries died. I think it is cool that the Peleng lens has such a wide field of view that it also caught the headlights of cars driving by on the highway.

This image is a stack of 20 photos @ 90 seconds each.

For the 26 image composite I used the maximum image stacking mode in Photoshop along with dark frame subtraction.

This image is a single 90 second exposure that shows Orion's Belt low on the horizon.

One Response to “Wide-Field Astrophotography in West Dover”

1. Sybil says:

   February 13, 2012 at 10:48 pm

   Oh wow. Love the time lapse image at the top.