First Astrophotography Timelapse

Astrophotography Timelapse

I had seen timelapse videos showing the stars in the night sky moving, showing the rotation of the earth, sometimes even showing the milky way as it traverses the night sky. Having done some research I found out that you need a digital shutter timer or intervalometer. I found one on Amazon for under €30 and the first attempt is shown below.

I used ISO 2000, a 20 second shutter speed at f/4 using a Tamron 10-24 wide angle lens and the focal length around 15mm as the 10mm fully wide angle was picking up stray light at times. The digital shutter timer was programmed with a 20 second shutter speed but a 5 second delay before each image so that the camera had a chance to have a break.I used the ‘M’ JPEG setting on the camera so that I could fit the images on the camera memory card and to reduce the time taken to create the timelapse video.

120 shots later I had compressed 1 hour into 6 seconds. Using a free app on my iMac I was able to produce the astrophotography timelapse video in a matter of seconds. The final result is shown below via my Flickr account – not too bad for the first attempt.

In the next attempt I will use a higher ISO, a slightly longer shutter speed and perhaps some post processing to increase star brightness and also to reduce the temperature so that there is less orange in the resultant timelapse.