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Subscribe to RSSPlains Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.
Star gazing on the plains of central South Dakota is a treat, if this timelapse video from Randy Halvorson — who braved chilly temps and howling winds this May to capture the Milky Way drifting across the night sky — is any guide.
"There were very few nights, when I could shoot, that were perfectly clear, and often the wind was blowing 25mph+," he writes on his website. "That made it hard to get the shots I wanted."
He kept most of the shots low to the ground to prevent the wind from shaking or blowing over his camera. Each ten seconds of video is about 2 hours and 2 minutes worth of time.
Be sure to check out Halvorson's Dakotalapse website for examples of his work.
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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).
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Stunning, just Stunning, visit the website for a bunch more, wow just stunning.
Indeed. The website is a must see. Very beautiful stuff.
Fake. The star field is clearly interposed over the actual sky shots. In some scenes I'm asked to believe that you can see the stars in SD when the sun is still high above the horizon, in others that the wind did not affect the trees over hours of shooting. Oh, and that the photo sensor on the camera was able to render an ambient light source and the star data without one either being too dim, or the other blindingly bright...not buying it. In one shot a meteor takes 5 seconds of camera time where I'm told 10 seconds is 2 hours and 20 minutes, you ever see a meteor take a hour to burn out?
And in some of the films on his website he even shows you a timelapse film of the mount and camera used to produce these types of shots. It's not fake pelagius, if you use the camera right you can see these things. I don't know about your meteor comment, I didn't see that 5 seconds you are talking about. But something that might look like a meteor in these videos is an airplane. It would look like a shooting star except it would be slower. perhaps that is what you are seeing.
@ Pelagius - Not fake. (At least, it does not appear so to me. While my images are not nearly as beautiful, I've been taking such images for decades.)
That's the Moon, not the Sun, that is sharing the sky with the stars.
As for the light meter - manual settings, with the aperture wide open - no light meter used. There is almost no ambient light, so with long exposure the minimal light fills the foreground.
As Mob points out, those are not meteors, but rather an assortment of planes and satellites, which take minutes (real time) to cross the sky from horizon to horizon.
I find it interesting that you are so quick to call this work fake, rather than to recognize that you are not knowledgeable in this area.
Sorry Pelagius that you aren't buying it. Perhaps if you knew anything about astro-photography, you'd sing a different tune. But, as they say, ignorance is bliss.
Wow... simply gorgeous.
The music and the beauty of the night sky, stir my Soul! Thank you for sharing!