With a couple of hours to spare one bleak winter's night I decided, in a moment of craziness, to head up to my local hills and see if I could make a reasonable stab at making a timelapse video of the constellation Orion tracking across the sky.
Orion is my favourite constellation, being so bright and such a graphic shape, but it's only in winter that we get to see it properly here oop north.
Anyhow, it was a moonless night which was good for star photography. it's amazing how much light even a crescent moon will add to the night sky.
However, the weather wasn't great, with intermittent clouds and hail blowing across my stars. It was also -2ºC so I spent most of the time huddled in my car while my good old Canon clicked away exposed to the elements.
I wasn't expecting much from this session, what with the clouds and rain filling the sky, but when I'd processed the video I was pleasantly suprised.
Maybe I could have done with a bit less cloud, but even so the resulting video was quite engaging. It looks even better in HD over on my YouTube channel - follow the link below to see this version.
I shot the stills for this sequence using a 24-105mm zoom at 24mm, fitted to my good old Canon 5D DSLR, firmly anchored onto my Manfrotto tripod.
Using what I'd learnt from previous attempts, I used the maximum aperture of f4 and wound the ISO up to 800 to make sure I captured as many stars as possible without introducing too much noise.
Shutter speed was set to 15 seconds and the shutter was fired continously for two hours.
In the freezing conditions I got through four fully charged batteries taking the 400+ stills that went to make up the video.
The RAW files were processed via Bridge in Adobe Camera RAW, with the noise reduction turned up to the max and a slight tweak in colour temperature to reduce the orange glow caused by light pollution on the clouds.
The processed stills were then loaded into Adobe Premiere to be strung together to make the video.
Filename - stars timelapse 01.mp4
Camera - Canon 5D
Lens - 24-105mm zoom @24mm
Location - Foel Ffenli, North Wales
This clip - HD 720p
All content copyright © Howard Litherland 2009-2024 unless otherwise stated.