Images and time lapse from The Dish

[alexch]

Hi All,

As Phil mentioned in an earlier thread we had great fun at The Dish on Friday. The DMA reception on Saturday was great too and it had been very nice to finally meet IIS members. Congratulations to all winners!

I am still going through the 30 GB of images I shot Friday night and managed to put together a time lapse with a sound track.
Youtube kills the quality so I uploaded the 35MB MP4 file to my ISP:
http://users.on.net/~che/parkes2010.mp4 (http://users.on.net/%7Eche/parkes2010.mp4)
For the time lapse I used Nikon D700 and Nikkor 14-24mm lens at 15-17mm and f/2.8. For the Milky Way parts the exposure time was 10-15s at ISO 3200, the twilight - 3s at ISO 800.

I attached star trails image I made from the time lapse data. The celestial equator dissecting The Dish was a bonus :)

I also made a 360 degrees virtual panorama in Adobe Flash (you can pan with the mouse click and drag; zoom in and out with ctrl/shift keys):
http://users.on.net/~che/Dish.swf (http://users.on.net/%7Eche/Dish.swf)

I made the 360 spherical panorama from 4 images with Nikkor 10.5mm fish-eye (hood shaved), 15s, ISO1600. Stitched in PTGui.



I hope there will be more images to follow as I get to process them.

Cheers,
Alex

P.S. I will be off-line and not able to respond until Tuesday night.

[M54]

Spectacular!:eyepop:

[h0ughy]

fantastic work

[Bolts_Tweed]

Not enough superlatives available - top class work

MB

[John Hothersall]

The 360deg panorama is amazing.

JohnH.

[Tom Davis]

Cool!! I really love the 360 image!! You should submit the 360 to APOD: bonnell@grossc.gsfc.nasa.gov

I think Jerry would love this panorama!

Tom

[DavidU]

That is masterful.Sensational work, I love it !
APOD?

[alexch]

Thanks everyone for the comments - I really appreciate them.

I just saw the time lapse on a laptop screen which was too bright and it looked awful and full of noise until I turned the brightness down.
It looks fine on my calibrated screens and on a large TV. So if you see too much noise then please turn the brightness down until the noise subsides to an acceptable level.

Cheers,
Alex

[PeterM]

Completely in a class of its own, outstanding doesn't say nearly enough.
Thank You for presenting this.

PeterM.

[luigi]

Excellent work Alex! Top notch!

[h0ughy]

Alex, i have a 10mm lens - how did you make the 360 view?

[iceman]

Brilliant work Alex! Inspirational!

[renormalised]

That is trippy!!!!:):)

Great work:):)

[[1ponders]]

stunningly brilliant Alex. :clap: That 360 is sensational. :bowdown:

Could you upload a smaller version of your animation for those of us that are connectionally challenged.

[Martin Pugh]

Great stuff....very skilled indeed.

cheers
Martin

[strongmanmike]

:question:......:eyepop:...I am bamboozzled by your abilities Alex, your grand physical stature is well matched to your imaging abilities :D

...I gotta finally get me a DSLR so I can try all these weird and wonderful things :thumbsup:

Mike

[rogerg]

Absolutely brilliant Alex.

[Liz]

Ditto on what the others have said - totally spectacular!!!!!!!! :eyepop:

[renormalised]

Just thought of something...there's one place in the universe where you could see this sort of trailing naturally. It's just a pity the gravity and other nasties would crush you flat and fry you to a crisp...the surface of a pulsar!!!:):)

Just think...Crab pulsar...33 revolutions a second. If that didn't trail the stars nothing would!!!:):P

[Phil Hart]

cracking stuff alex.. glad you could share it with us yesterday even it does lose something via the projector. everybody was still impressed. just need that 12V adaptor so you can run the camera all night now!

Phil

[Phil Hart]

forgot to mention that you might like to look at smugmug.com for better quality video sharing. for an annual fee, you can even upload Full HD resolution video which viewers can choose to watch at whatever resolution their connection supports. and you can embed decent quality video as well.

[suma126]

360 pano thats awesome it felt like i was playing a game on the play station.:cool:

[gregbradley]

A masterpiece Alex. It was also nice to meet you and get your advice on lenses and cameras.

A winner for sure for next year taken just before the awards!!

Greg.

[multiweb]

Another very nice time lapse. Beautiful. :thumbsup:

[TheAstroGuy]

Holy Hanna!!!

That is beyond amazing, magnificent work there, the effort , the skill, the concept, everything "A+++" VERY WELL DONE i would be very very very proud to call that my own work.Thank you for showing us this.

Kindest Regards

Shane

[alexch]

You need a panoramic head like this:
http://www.nodalninja.com/
It allows to rotate a lens around a "no-paralax point" and has a click-stop rotator which is very useful at night.

With 10.5mm lens on a full frame body I do four shots in portrait orientation at 15 degrees angle looking up (on a D300 you will need 6 shots). Then I use PTGui and stitch the 360 spherical panorama, which is a bit tricky with night time shots and I sometimes have to use manual control points on the stars. I then convert to Flash in Pano2VR.

There are a few good online resources on panoramic images, I found this one a good start:
http://www.panoguide.com/howto/

If you get to doing those and have any questions just give me a shout and I will be happy to assist.

Cheers,
Alex

[alexch]

Thanks Phil - the most expensive 9V DC adaptor from Nikon ($170 !!!) has arrived in the mail today :). I had to get it from Nikon because of the custom socket I could not find anywhere.

[RB]

Alex the 360 panno is just stunning !!

:thumbsup:

[alexch]

Thanks Paul!

I uploaded the time lapse to vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/13668636

[alexch]

Thanks again for very nice comments everyone!

I could not resist making a "little planet" projection of the same 360 panorama (attached).

Cheers,
Alex

[RB]

:lol:
Love it.
Excellent once again Alex !

[gregbradley]

That's a wonderful image. How do you do that little planet effect?

What camera and lens did you use here. Was it the 14-24 and Nikon D3?

I just love it.

Greg.

[alexch]

Thanks Greg!

I did this one with Nikon D700 and 10.5mm fish-eye. This lens with removed hood covers about 200 degrees so I only need four or even three images to make the 360 degrees spherical panorama.

I made a 360 panorama with 14-24mm lens before and it needed 2 rows of 6 images each. Although the 14-24mm lens produces much higher resolution panoramas (50MP vs 24MP with 10.5mm) it is a real pain to stitch.

The "little planet" is a stereographic projection (used in cartography to map the Earth) - one of many available in PTGui software I use for stitching panoramas.

Cheers,
Alex

[h0ughy]

how good is that

[TheAstroGuy]

Alex,

Thanks twice over, firstly for the inspirational images and video, secondly for keeping my mind occupied during a waxing moon and rainy nights.
I've been going nuts making pano pictures in my lounge room:) gotta start small

Regards
Shane

[gregbradley]

Thanks Alex.

With time lapse imaging, do you need special software to stitch together the time lapse images?

How do you handle the transition from day to night? Estimate the ISO and exposure for night or can you change it once it has started?

Greg.

[alexch]

Both Phil and I use Sony Vegas for video editing but there are free tools that will do a good job, VirtualDub is one example and here is a nice tutorial:
http://timelapseblog.com/2009/08/04/using-virtualdub-for-time-lapse/

I have not yet tried to make a day-night-day time-lapse because my batteries only last about 3-4 hours. In the Parkes time-lapse I just set it up for night exposures and overexposed about 2 f/stops starting in the twilight. Because of the Moon in the frame the exposure time was considerably shorter (3s) than normally (15s). I can't change the exposure settings once a time-lapse has started without stopping it but this is when Sony Vegas helps with a set of digital transitions to change from one scene to another (like the spiral used in the time-lapse above).

Cheers,
Alex

[gregbradley]

Thanks Alex.

Does Images Plus enable this sort of work? That way you can control everything from your laptop. Not sure it would enable changing things whilst it is underway unless you stopped quickly changed it and got it going again really quickly like a Formula One car pitstop.

I'll check out that software.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge here Alex. Masterful work.

Sounds like you need a better battery solution. Not that your image is noisy at all but batteries do heat up as they discharge and add thermal noise to DSLRs. The powered false battery setup is preferable and then how you get power to that I am not sure. Perhaps a 12 volt battery and an inverter to 240V from that and the battery/transformer power supply.
It'd last all night with a decent sized battery (deep cycle).

Greg.

[marc4darkskies]

Hmmmm ... missed this somehow Alex!!

Let my emoticon speak for me ...

:bowdown:

Cheers, Marcus

[h0ughy]

Well congratulations on your APOD (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/) today mate!

[alexch]

Thanks, it is a great honour and reward to see it on APOD :)

[Octane]

Alex,

Congrats!

H

[Tom Davis]

I knew that Jerry would love it! It just had to be an APOD.

Congrats!!

Tom

[alexch]

Humayun, Tom - thanks a lot!

[Astroman]

Very nice work, and congratulations on APOD.

[alexch]

Thanks, Andrew!