We car camped at our friend's wilderness land in the Mendocino County mountains. (See also: day fun film.) Todd realized the shower's peak coincided with a new (no) moon so we went to try to see meteors and catch some on film!
We have 4 time lapses. We used a Canon EOS-30D 8MP camera on a tripod, "slaved" via USB2.0 to a Sony VAIO laptop. When batteries croaked, we used an inverter to the cigarette lighter 8-).
WATCH THIS IN THE DARK!
Pictures: Each shot on the 2nd night was ISO-200, 15 second exposure, F-stop of 1.4. Each image is a monstrous 3504x2336 pixels. I cut the width and height by 50% (to 1752x1168) and then chopped the "best" 1600x896 rectangle out from there for highest quality preservation.
Video: I used ImageMagick to resize, chop and "gamma correct" (make them brighter) the images, and then fed the stack of images to ffmpeg The best video is this (h.264) MPEG-4, which is: 9000Kb/s, 10 frames-per-second, 1600x896 (16:9 aspect) (and a smaller version can be seen in the video player above 8-)
FIRST NIGHT:
(1st clip) test shooting on the first night. there is some minor tripod movements, some exposure/lighting shifts, and some (I think) ambient flashlight "noise". Still, it was exciting to see how *fast* the stars shift
SECOND NIGHT:
(2nd clip) attempt to capture dusk after sunset and get the stars as they start to "peek through". watch for an airplane on the lower right and a satellite shoot by.
(3rd clip) attempt to capture the visible milky way "cloud" while still being in a position to see maximal "spinning of the stars" (by aiming pretty close to the north star).
(4th clip) after seeing many meteors in a certain section, we aimed there and caught 3 meteors towards the very end, upper left corner!
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