Weather Timelapse: Lenticular Clouds in the Eastern Sierra

A few nights ago I watched lenticular clouds form over the Three Sisters in the Sweetwater Range, across Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border in the Eastern Sierra. It looked like a little sunset light might get through, so I took a few photographs, and set up my camera to capture a time-lapse sequence of several hundred more, so I could convert them into a video.

As the direct sunlight left the scene and the light faded towards the blue light of twilight, is looked like the cloud cover was too thick, and sunset simply wasn't going to happen.

Then a hint of orange started to appear, and brighten, at the bottom of the stack of clouds.



I reframed the image to capture detail of the evolving light over the Three Sisters.

The sunset light was brief, but intense, and the roughly 1000 photos that I took to capture the moment payed off!

I processed a few hundred of the images into a time-lapse video so you could see the whole event.  Here's the best edit I've produced so far:

Planets, Orionids and Zodiacal Light

Meteor with Venus, Jupiter and Mars rising in zodiacal light during the Orionids, October 22, 2015

Who saw or photographed some Orionid meteors over the last night or two?  In the photo above, a meteor crosses over the path of Venus, Jupiter and Mars, rising in zodiacal light during the Orionid meteor shower around 5 am this morning, October 22, 2015.

Although the streak is clearly a meteor (note the characteristic green color), technically it's not an Orionid, since the radiant point for the Orionid meteor shower is out of the upper right corner of the frame.  So this meteor is traveling at nearly a right angle to what its trajectory would be if it were one of the Orionids.

It may however be a Leo Minorid meteor, since its radiant point is to the left of Venus Jupiter and Mars this morning.  The Leo Minorid meteor shower peaks the morning of October 23, but it is a minor shower with an estimated 2 meteors per hour, but minor showers sometimes have an unexpectedly high rate, so tomorrow morning could offer a surprise from the Leo Minorids along with after-peak Orionids.

There are also random, sporadic meteors, particularly in the early morning, as your position on the earth rotates to the leading side of the earth as it travels through space rotating around the sun.

The Zodiacal light is sunlight shining off of dust in our solar system, the light tilted up from the lower left in the photo above.  You can experience the Zodiacal light, or false dawn, this time of year when a a pyramid-shaped glow can be seen in the east an hour before dawn's first light (or 80 to 120 minutes before sunrise). This light is caused by sunlight reflecting off of dust particles in space in the same plane as earth and can resemble the lights from a city. It is tilted to follow the same ecliptic plane that the planets travel in.  Zodiacal light is best seen under dark skies, in places with minimal light pollution.  You can catch the Zodiacal light for another 2 or 3 mornings this month, but after that the moon will be too full and it will no longer set early enough to leave you with a dark enough sky to see this pre-dawn light.

You can see the Zodiacal light as the planets rise in this time-lapse video captured this morning before and twilight light started to brighten the sky:

Venus, Jupiter and Mars in Zodiacal light during the Orionid meteor shower this morning

Total Lunar Eclipse September 27 2015

Total Lunar Eclipse September 27, 2015: wide angle time-lapse and 640mm effective live action footage from the total lunar eclipse last night.  The partly cloudy forecast and webcam images didn't look all that promising in the Eastern Sierra yesterday afternoon, so I ditched my plans to pursue one of several compositions that I had worked out, and I stayed home to see if the moon would make any appearance at all.

I watched for about an hour after it was supposed to rise at 6:44, but there was no sign of it, so I left my camera shooting a sequence of images for a time-lapse video, and I went back inside.  A few minutes later, the fully eclipsed moon was visible through a break in the clouds, from 7:56 - 8:06.  I came back out a while later, but the moon was behind the clouds, so I didn't know that it had made a brief appearance until I reviewed the images later!

As the moon was more than halfway through the partial, umbral phase coming out of total eclipse, it emerged from the clouds and starting lighting up the clouds and landscape with increasingly bright light.

As the face of the moon returned to fully lit in the penumbral phase of the eclipse, there was a nice halo of color around the moon, so I set up a second camera to capture that.  I used my Canon EOS 70D with the EF 70-200mm f/4 IS L Series lens and a 2X teleconverter, for an effective focal length of 640mm.  The clouds were moving pretty quickly, so I also captures dome live video of the clouds moving across the face of the moon.  I had the camera on a sky-tracking mount, so the moon remains essentially still in the frame.

I didn't shoot where I expected or capture what I anticipated, but by being there to catch changes in the weather, I captured some interesting results.

Perseid Meteor Shower 2015

Comet Swift-Tuttle only passes the earth and circles the sun once every 133 years, but the earth passes through its trail of dust every year.  The debris field is large, so Perseid meteors may be seen on nights from July 17 through August 24.  The earth passes through the most dense portion of the comet's dust trail on the night of August 12-13, so that is when the peak, or maximum hourly rate of meteors, is seen.

On any given night, the sun sets as your position on the earth rotates away from the sun, then around midnight you rotate to a point directly opposite the sun. As the earth also moves in its orbit around the sun, your position on the earth is just starting to rotate to the side of the earth leading its movement through space, which collides with more debris. So meteor rates go up starting at midnight. At dawn you're approximately in the middle of the face of the earth as it flies through space, so meteor rates continue to climb slightly towards dawn. So the best bet in the evening is after midnight, in the last hours of darkness before the dawn's oncoming light brightens the sky.

This year I pursued the Perseids on the mornings of August 9, 11, 12 and 13. The best viewing was on the peak morning of the 13th, as expected. The composite photo above shows many of the meteors that my camera picked up over the course of nearly four hours.

I also assembled a time-lapse video that condenses several hours of meteor activity into seconds of video. You can see it on Vimeo here:


Perseid Meteor Shower 2015 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Not everything that moves in the video are meteors; the meteors are the brief streaks of light, the slower ones are airplanes.  As you see the Milky Way and stars move, that is from the rotation of the earth. You can also see smoke from forest fires.

According to Wikipedia, Comet Swift–Tuttle has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity". But don't worry, its next close encounter with the earth isn't expected until the year 4479. With a nucleus 26 kilometers across, if there were an impact, the force is estimated to be 27 times larger than the one which formed the Chicxulub crater beneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which is believed to have caused the extinction the dinosaurs.

Doomsday preppers take note, you only have 2464 years to get ready!

Time-lapse of the Milky Way Rising in the Mojave Desert

In late April I was out camping in the desert, and I set an alarm to get up in the early morning hours to catch the Milky Way rise.  Around 1 am the first bits of it were just rising over the eastern horizon, so I set up two cameras, to catch both static and panning views of it.

The camera on a stationary tripod captured images that I could also process to create star trails images:

See the link to my star trails tutorial below

 Here's the time-lapse video captured on a second camera, using a sky-tracking, panning mount:


Digital Rights Management by Nimia

 Here's the time-lapse video captured on the stationary camera:


Digital Rights Management by Nimia

I set another alarm to wake up near sunrise to stop the time-lapses, and with one of the cameras I captured multiple shots to stitch together a panorama of the Milky Way, now forming a high arc in the sky.

Milky Way Over Joshua Trees, Panorama

It all turned out really well.  I should sleep at work more often!

Here's some introductory information on night photography techniques, in case you want to try yourself:

How to Capture Milky Way Images

http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/05/25/producing-milky-way-images/

Create Star Trails Images

http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/2011/05/25/creating-star-trail-images/

I can show you more advanced techniques as well as these in more detail during night photography workshops in the "ghost town" of Bodie. We have five workshops scheduled in 2015, with dates available from May through October.  Several of the workshops also offer special escorted access into building interiors, which are not generally open to the public:
http://www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/blog/bodie-night-photography-workshops/


P.S. - Thanks in advance for lies, shares, +1s, comments, or any other honors that you choose to bestow on my blog posts!  With my book done, I'm trying to get a lot more active on updates to my blog, so you should see a lot more activity and updates here in the coming weeks and months.  I also have a "new"(er) blog, which I use to consolidate social media posts to: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com.

Applause for the Appulse: Moon, Mars and Venus

Venus, Mars and the moon setting over Mt. Whitney

I thought that I was having a good day to catch some nice photos of the crescent moon by Mars and Venus last month, setting behind Mount Whitney.

Then I put a sequence of photos together in a time-lapse video, and the event came to life!


I posted a link to my Twitter account @JeffSullPhoto, and +Philip Plait embedded the copy of my video on Vimeo in a post on his +Bad Astronomy blog on +Slate:
"Venus, Mars, and the Moon Go to Sleep".
He tweeted a link:

Watch a short, lovely time-lapse of the Moon, Mars, & Venus going night-night. http://t.co/fU7Z2HgHoJ pic.twitter.com/HaU6MMpSym
— Phil Plait (@BadAstronomer) March 8, 2015

Then the +California Academy of Sciences tweeted a link as well:

Oh-so-lovely time-lapse of when Venus, Mars & the Moon recently "met" in the sky: http://t.co/gLbZeXZoNO #appulse pic.twitter.com/glqzmeL2hG
— CA AcademyOfSciences (@calacademy) March 9, 2015

It's cool to have astronomers and scientists recognize and share my astrophotography!  Check out Phil's blog post if you have the time.  He always adds some nice scientific context.  What most of us call a "conjunction" is actually called an "appluse".

Geminid Meteor Shower 2014 in HD

Time-lapse video footage from the Geminid meteor shower on the nights of December 13 and 14, 2014. Shot at Topaz Lake in the Eastern Sierra region, on the California-Nevada border.

Here's a description of the Geminid meteor shower from NASA:

"Geminids are pieces of debris from an object called 3200 Phaethon. Long thought to be an asteroid, Phaethon is now classified as an extinct comet. Basically it is the rocky skeleton of a comet that lost its ice after too many close encounters with the sun. Earth runs into a stream of debris from 3200 Phaethon every year in mid-December, causing meteors to fly from the constellation Gemini. When the Geminids first appeared in the early 19th century, shortly before the U.S. Civil War, the shower was weak and attracted little attention. There was no hint that it would ever become a major display."

Composite photos showing multiple 2014 Geminid meteors

I'll be teaching photographers how to capture meteor showers in a photography workshop during the Geminid meteor shower in Death Valley in December 2015: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com

#Geminids #meteorshower #science #breakingnews #astronomy +Death Valley Workshops 

Leonid Meteor Shower: Timelapse HD Video

Leonid Meteor Shower : Timelapse HD Video, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan.

You should see two big ones top center, then a lot of little ones down near the horizon after that.

Assembled from 224 30 second photos taken last night from 1-3am in the Eastern Sierra, California, during the Leonid meteor shower in 2009.

All I can say now in 2014 is wow, my technique has progressed a lot since 2009!

2014 Perseid Meteor Shower Begins

The annual Perseid meteor shower is ramping up, but the moon will increasingly interfere with viewing as the shower's peak approaches. This one was caught to the northeast while out looking for Delta Aquarids and Piscis Austranids earlier this week.

I pursue photos and time-lapse videos of every meteor shower when conditions are favorable. Here's my Perseid meteor shower footage from 2013:


   How to Create a Time-lapse Video on Your Digital Camera.

NASA Launch This Week: Orbiting Carbon Observatory

NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory Launch from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

What happens when a time-lapse astrophotographer goes to a NASA launch?  Enjoy my latest edit of this new footage, just uploaded to +Vimeo :https://vimeo.com/99906771.  
NASA's OCO-2 Orbiting Carbon Observatory will take 1 million measurements daily at a resolution of one square mile, enabling the analysis of local, regional, national and global CO2 emissions and trends.
My new blog: www.JeffSullivanPhotography.com
#NASA #science #news #space #climatescience #NASAJPL #NASASocial #OCO2

Perseid Meteor Shower 2013

Perseid Meteor Shower August 2013:

Don't watch in this tiny window though... start it, then click "watch on YouTube" at the bottom, then the little gear icon to make it go 1080p or 720p HD, then click on the icon to make it go full screen.  Enjoy!

I have a copy on Vimeo as well in case you might like to compare the two:


Perseid Meteor Shower 2013 from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Watch this in 720P or 1080P HD resolution. Over six minutes of footage from recent nights in 2013 during the Perseid Meteor Shower. The slower, mostly horizontal lights are airplanes. The brief flashes of mostly vertical streaks are the meteors (a few slower ones are satellites). Many meteors are faint, so you'll only see most of them if you follow the instructions above and change the viewing resolution to HD and expand the video full screen.
For the soundtrack, the timelapse video of the Perseid meteor shower is set to the InFiction String Remix of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", as featured in the recent Kia commercial (used with permission).

All images © 2013 Jeff Sullivan. To license Perseid meteor shower or other time-lapse footage, please contact me. All unauthorized uses will be pursued.

Orionid Meteor Shower 2012 Time-lapse Video - Music by Life Audience

My timelapse video including footage from the 2012 Orionid meteor shower is up on YouTube, enjoy!  I included some weather footage as a lead-in to help fill out the length of the song used, then the night photography starts a little after the 2 minute mark:  http://youtu.be/BDeWDJLmEIc?hd=1

Here's how you can shoot your own time-lapse video of the orionid meteor shower:Create a Timelapse Video of a Meteor Showerhttp://activesole.blogspot.com/2011/08/create-timelapse-video-of-meteor-shower.html

Orionid meteor shower October 20 - 21, 2012

I've been out chasing every major meteor shower since 2009, and many minor ones, whenever the viewing conditions are favorable.  Some of my more successful night of shooting have been published as time-lapse videos: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6012D9822C1BA1E7

If you like the soundtrack, check out the rest of the album by Life Audience over on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/wave-particles/id427106760
I love it, and no, they didn't pay me to say that!