[AZ-Observing] Time-Lapse: One Hour at Five Mile Meadow

HI all,

On Saturday at the 5MM star party, I set my camera up just south of all of the 
scopes, and pointed the fisheye lens above Polaris.  The camera was set to 
continuous shooting, and took 30-second exposures with a second or so between 
exposures until the already depleted battery died an hour later.  The result is 
a Quicktime movie (10 megabytes!) with 110 frames that I put up here:  

http://tinyurl.com/yqbxqa

The movie is on one of those free Web hosting services, so it may take a while 
to download.

Thanks to Richard Payne for offering some good advice out in the meadow, and to 
Dean Ketelsen for motivating me to give this stuff a try.  The lessons learned 
are:

- 30 seconds is not enough exposure at f/4 and ISO 800.
- Take in-camera dark frames for each image.
- Take the camera out of auto-color balance mode (the sky turns a shade of blue 
every time the camera is flashed by a red flashlight).


For those who want to give this a try but are shying away from the $130 Canon 
timer remote, continuous time-lapse sequences with exposures up to 30 seconds 
long can be done with a garden-variety remote.

Tom
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