Time is the most valuable thing a person can spend.
—Theophrastus
Most of the world’s population has never seen the Milky Way and there are fewer places to do so every year. Thankfully Oregon still has much of the state in dark dark night skies of Bortle 1.
When I’m out on night photo adventure I take at least one camera to capture time-lapses of the night sky. This is the first camera I set up and the last one I take down. It is busy taking pictures while I wait for the stars to align for the still image I envisioned. This allows me to create 15″ – 30″ videos of the Milky Way playing center stage in the night sky.
Night sky time-lapses are easy to create; tripod, camera with wide angle lens and an intervalometer, often built into the camera, are all that’s required. I use inexpensive external intervalometers, mostly because my Canon bodies don’t have one built in.
To get a good night exposure will take from 15″ to 30″. Typical playback speeds are 24fps or 30fps. To get what I consider a stately parade of the Milky Way across the night sky requires taking pictures on a 25″ to 30″ interval. To be safe it takes 2″ of dark time, closed shutter, for the camera to write the image to the memory card before taking the next picture.
When taking stills of the night sky sharp focus and shorter shutter times are needed to get resulting sharp star images. With time-lapses there is more leeway. A longer exposure producing undesirable trailing in a still lends to the sense of motion in a time-lapse; the longer exposure also allows for lighter foregrounds.
This time-lapse is from Crater Lake during wildfire season with active fires in the area producing a lot of smoke. During the evening hours the smoke poured over the crater rim, settling in the caldera with the Milky Way rising above.
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