Time-lapse movies of Milky Way

I spent a week in King's Canyon/Sequoia National Park a couple weeks ago (during the new moon), and came away with two surprisingy amazing time-lapse movies of the Milky Way galaxy traveling across the night sky. You may want to set your browser to full screen for best effect. (These are flash animations of sequential frames. See tech details below.)

www.danheller.com/kings-canyon-star-trails-1



www.danheller.com/kings-canyon-star-trails-2



Each exposure was 30 seconds at f2.8 at ISO 3200 (Canon 1DsMark3, EF 16-35mm f2.8L set at 16mm). The trees were very dimly lit by a nearby hotel (2nd photo), thereby making their perceived illumination comparable to the stars. I used a Canon interval time/cable release to shoot each shot successively for about 2 hours per sequence. Once the pictures were shot, I strung them together using FotoMagico into a quicktime movie. I then imported the movie into Adobe Flash to create the web page for each movie clip. You can see more photos from the entire trip here: http://www.danheller.com/kings-canyon