I love all the time-lapse videos I’ve been seeing over the past few months. They show the night sky the way I see it: ethereal, mysterious, beautiful, and awe-inspiring.
Photographer Randy Halverson created this stunning video from images he took just last month in the bone-chilling winter of South Dakota. He calls it "Sub Zero". Make sure you’ve set it to show the HD version.
Amazing! I love how it starts with a Moon halo: the ring around the Moon as light from our satellite refracts through ice crystals in the air. You can see the familiar constellations of Orion and Taurus throughout the video, as well as stars like Sirius and the Pleiades cluster. Each picture was an exposure of several seconds, and in some, like the ones with the playground in the foreground, you see the blurring of terrestrial objects from the wind. [UPDATE: Randy just sent me a note; you can see animals moving in and out of the attic on the right side of the house in the playground shot. Raccoons? Well, something that can survive the temperatures. Ice warriors, probably.]
I remember when I was first dabbling in astrophotography when I was in high school. I took shots of the northern sky from my driveway, and when I developed them (yes, they were film and I used a darkroom and everything) I was deeply surprised to see the blue sky and well-lit houses and ground! But I quickly understood that these were long exposures, and any scattered light — street lights, Washington DC on my horizon to the northeast, and so on — would make these look more like daytime shots… even though you could see stars in the sky. Randy’s video (and others like it I’ve posted in the past; see Related Posts below) show the same effect. It looks like they were taken in the day, until you see the sky littered with stars.
And as much as I love big, splashy wide-angle shots of the night sky, the addition of a slowly moving viewpoint as the stars wheel overhead makes these videos even more enthralling. It’s hard to imagine a better way to show people the art and magnificence of what we see every night over our heads.
Video credit: Randy Halverson, used with permission.
Related posts:
- Awesome timelapse video: Rapture
- Orion in the Mayan skies
- Sidereal motion
- Time lapse: The spinning Chilean sky
- AMAZING wide-angle time lapse night sky video!
March 28th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Awesome! I love it.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:21 am
Spectacular and beautiful timelapse.
Greetings
March 28th, 2011 at 11:28 am
spectacular…although i wished i could experience this in person…the video captured the glory…with gratitude and love…
March 28th, 2011 at 11:36 am
Oh yeah, that’s what the winter skies look like. Astronomy in Seattle has been cancelled this winter.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:47 am
Very cool! You can see animals climbing up the left front corner post of the house too, right at the end of the playground scene.
March 28th, 2011 at 11:49 am
Very cool!
March 28th, 2011 at 11:56 am
Wow! The odd thing for me, being from New Zealand is seeing all those familiar constellations upside down. Thanks for posting this!
March 28th, 2011 at 12:05 pm
Wow that moon looks bright in the opening scene, great video!
March 28th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Awesome.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:40 pm
That scene with the playground and the house was a little creepy. Animals climbing on the house and the swing jittering.
March 28th, 2011 at 12:56 pm
I loved the house – colors were skewed towards very cool. Thank you for this!
March 28th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Incredible!! Does anyone know the rig he used to position the camera? I can’t imagine he’d be able to shoot all these by hand and yet still have the video play so smoothly.
March 28th, 2011 at 1:54 pm
@12 Dean,
Use Phil’s link to his Vimeo page for a full description of the hardware employed and other tech info for this video.
According to his Vimeo posting, for ‘Sub Zero’ a Stage Zero dolly made by Dynamic Perception and a Milapse mount was used on most of the shots (and he includes a link to the Dynamic Perception website).
March 28th, 2011 at 2:25 pm
[...] Ook de van een halo voorziene maan aan het begin van de video is prachtig in beeld gebracht. Bron: Bad Astronomy. Gerelateerde Astroblog:Adembenemend, deze timelapse video Tags: timelapse | Categorie: [...]
March 28th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
Amazing! And what a coincidence that today’s APOD is very similar: Time-lapse auroras over Norway, by Terje Sorgjerd, also on Vimeo. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110328.html and http://vimeo.com/21294655
March 28th, 2011 at 2:54 pm
Absolutely wonderful
March 28th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Pretty work!
Check out timescapes.com for more georgeous time-lapse work!
I did spot a little jiggery pokery going on, though, in the barn shot at 2:10. It’s running backward. The sky’s rotating the wrong way. Ursa Major is setting behind the barn and should be rising.
Of course, time-lapse is all about jiggery pokery anyway…
March 28th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Superb!
March 28th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Or given the piece’s title maybe ice ninjas? Specifically this :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Zero_(Mortal_Kombat)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWuFygkoeC0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23tsYPNTqW8&feature=watch_response
character with supernatural control over ice and a propensity for ripping head and spines off his kills maybe?
March 28th, 2011 at 3:36 pm
I totally dig the abandoned houses in your vid!
March 28th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Stunning, indeed! Randy takes a landscape that most of us wouldn’t even remember if we drove through but, used as the frame for atmospheric and celestial events, produces a deep emotional quality. The abandoned houses and barn from another era lend it a lot of sadness. At least the buildings are used by other life (you can also see two raccoons (?) climbing up the porch pillar on the left side of the house at the end of the house sequence.)
March 28th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
If you look really carefully at the abandoned house at 52 seconds or so, you can see the camera moving out from the doorway on its track, shooting the previous scene. Very cool Alfred Hitchcock cameo, in a way.
March 28th, 2011 at 8:36 pm
The Ice Warriors are invading again? Dangit, grab the Brigadier out of retirement *sigh*
Really though, AWESOME video. Seriously.
March 28th, 2011 at 9:08 pm
[...] Dakota Lapse [...]
March 29th, 2011 at 5:48 am
Very nice! I liked the flare as it progresses from 19 seconds through 25 or so. A rocket launch seems appropriate.
March 29th, 2011 at 6:56 am
Holy Haleakala…
March 29th, 2011 at 7:04 am
Good catch, Jearley! You’ve got good eyes!
March 29th, 2011 at 7:44 am
Sub Zero…
Beautiful time lapse photography of the South Dakota night sky, shot mostly in sub zero temperatures. Details of what he used andexposures here Sub Zero – winter night timelapse from Randy Halverson on Vimeo. h/t Bad Astronomy……
March 29th, 2011 at 7:59 am
Good eyes on the barn shot Richard.
That is the camera coming out of the window at the old house, a timelapse of a timelapse being shot.
March 29th, 2011 at 10:17 am
Absolutely beautiful!! While I don’t live there any more, this is the South Dakota I will forever call home. Thank you for this!
March 29th, 2011 at 10:30 am
Wowza. This is made of awesome.
It’s just a shame that the embedded player is such crap. I was able to extract the original page URL from the embed code so i could view this made-of-awesome clip at Richard’s original Vimeo page. Whoooaaaa, yeah, that’s sweet.
My desperation for a viable alternative to the blowsy, trashy, censorious YouTube makes Vimeo’s choppy, busted playback even more frustrating. Luckily, though, I was able to nab the original URL so I could properly experience the awesomeness in this piece. The moving POV really makes all the difference. Pheeeeee-eww! Man, yeah!
March 29th, 2011 at 12:17 pm
nice,
watch the living earth breath and interface with the larger universe.
March 30th, 2011 at 10:13 am
Gorgeous video. I wonder if this is how three-toed sloths perceive the world?
March 30th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
Obviously fake. You can see the stars!
- Jack
March 30th, 2011 at 11:14 pm
Nice work, Randy! What tipped me off was the clockwise sky rotation. After seeing the clip a couple times without noticing anything, it dawned on me that there was something odd about that shot. Seeing the pointer stars of UMajor sealed the deal. I agree with your aesthetic choice of reversing the shot. It looks better with it ending on the starry sky.
You must’ve frozen your yingyangs off!
March 31st, 2011 at 5:43 am
[...] to Phil Plait’s post on his Bad Astronomy web [...]
April 3rd, 2011 at 11:51 am
[...] Auch wenn wir jetzt zwei Tage vorgezogenen Sommer haben/hatten, hier ein eiskaltes Zeitraffervideo – am besten in HD-Vollbild anschauen (via Bad Astronomy) [...]
April 3rd, 2011 at 12:31 pm
[...] Bad Astronomy] Share and Enjoy:Related posts:Tom Lowe's "Rapture"This is Big–LiterallyNew York [...]
May 3rd, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Beautiful video, but, audio kills it.
Try running it with Enduser “End of a Beginning (Sublight Version)”
June 4th, 2011 at 4:45 pm
Amazing and stunning. Would love to know what the song is as well. It’s perfect for this video. Absolutely incredible video!!!!!!!!!!! It blew me away!
June 16th, 2011 at 3:45 am
hi .
awsome footage with stunning places.
its verry nice and the time and effort u put into making them is just unbeleaveble.
tnx for shearing this with the world.
cheers from belgium.