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:

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.

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!

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

Seasons of Topaz

Seasons of Topaz, my latest time-lapse video,with "Sierra Wave" lenticular clouds, pogonip ice fog, rain, snow, sunrises, sunsets... a year's worth of weather in 3 minutes: http://youtu.be/W07_Yol2Ad4


The music, used with permission, is "Odyssey" (instrumental version) by The Wyld, as heard in the McDonald's commercials during the Sochi Winter Olympics.  Drop by their Web site for links to their social media pages where you can say "Hi": http://thewyldmusic.com/ 

Meteor Shower from Comet ISON?

Meteor Shower from Comet ISON?*
Robert Lunsford of the  recently posted details on a possible meteor shower from Comet ISON passing near the earth's orbit on its way towards its rendezvous with the sun.  I had heard that the earth could reach the debris in the January 12 -15 time frame, so I went out early on 3 mornings to see what I could pick up.  I've condensed hundreds of photos from those nights into the HD video below.  

As illustrated in a diagram on Robert's post here, the incoming meteors were expected to appear to radiate out from a point in the constellation Leo:
Meteor Activity from Comet ISON?
http://www.amsmeteors.org/2014/01/meteor-activity-from-comet-ison/

Meteor trails look longer away form a meteor shower's radiant point though, so the first two nights I shot north to minimize star movement and northeast in case the movement of the earth through space caused extra collisions with comet dust to the east.  On the third night I trained my 24mm lens on Leo and I used a sky-tracking mount to follow the constellation while shooting almost continuously for hours.  I did capture a bright and colorful meteor trail:

Unfortunately its length and direction, along with a second meteor captured 10 minutes earlier, implies that its radiant point was across the sky near the Big Dipper, so those were more likely to be late arrivals from the Quadrantid meteor shower which peaked on January 3.

So did I catch any meteors from ISON?  I swear that I can see little flashes in my original images as they were getting down-converted in resolution to video, but it's hard to peer into 22 megapixel images to detect the smallest details on a 2 megapixel monitor.   Even my video gets compressed for re-broadcast from video hosting sites, so it's even harder to show others what I captured.  The question might not be definitively answered until I re-examine the results some time from now when I can re-process the images in "4K" video format and can view the 4X higher resolution video on a 4K monitor (4096 or 3840 resolution).

The increasing brightness of the moon and its later rise times started interfering with meteor viewing on the third night, so I decided not to shoot on the fourth night.  I've shot dozens of meteor showers in the past, but this time I was particularly focused on trying to capture the faintest of meteors, so it was good to "push the envelope" and develop new insight and techniques which can fine tune my meteor shower shooting in the future.

Here's another shot of that meteor, with room to see Leo just to the right:

To see more of my time-lapse videos from more major meteor showers, drop by my  channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/JeffSullivanPhoto

Comet Lovejoy C/2013 R1 1/4/2014 85mm 30fps 1080p HD Time-lapse Video

Comet Lovejoy C/2013 R1 1/4/2014 85mm 30fps 1080p, originally uploaded by Jeffrey Sullivan.

This video converts 762 individual photos shot at 85mm focal length into 1080p HD video at 30 frames per second. Each photo was cropped to approximately 3840 pixels on the longest side ("4K video"), then they were converted to HD video at 1920 x 1080 resolution (1/4 the original resolution).

This was shot before dawn on January 4, 2014 on a standard tripod (no tracking mount).  Most of the streaks passing through the frame occupy several photos (which have an average exposure time of 2.5 seconds each), so most appear to be satellites.  It was shot less than 24 hours after the peak of the Quadrantid meteor shower though, and Comet Lovejoy isn't all that far in the sky from the radiant point of that shower, so if I hunt through all of the 762 photos I might find a Quadrantid meteor or two.

This blog post is a test of sharing a 1080p HD video from Flickr to Blogger... click on "HD" and the full screen icon in the lower right corner to see it in the highest possible resolution!  It may need to play twice before the player gets it fully buffered for smooth playback.

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.

Venus, Jupiter, Mercury Conjunction (1080p, 30fps)

The planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury are close together in the evening sky this week, so every night I've been trying to capture them together on the horizon in the twilight hours before they set. The first night the clouds were too thick. The second night I was shooting sunset in high winds at Mono Lake with the Sierra Nevada as a high western horizon, so I caught a few pictures of the planets, but they set too quickly to capture a time-lapse video. The third night was just right, relatively clear to the west, I was in a high shooting position with an apparent horizon lower than my position (less than 0 degrees elevation), and fortunately that was Sunday May 16, the night when they'd be closest together, forming a tight triangle.

There was still wind to deal with so I changed position a few times to minimize it. I could only use one camera because I had loaned my daughter one of my quick release plates the day before and it was still on her camera back home. There wasn't a lot of light and I was shooting with a 2X teleconverter on my 70-200mm lens at close to 310mm, so my aperture was limited to f/8, forcing me to bump up the ISO to minimize shutter speed in that wind. Fortunately I worked out all the trade-offs in time to capture about four hundred frames, enough to create this time-lapse video. 

Here's how my four days of effort to capture this event turned out:

May 24 from Lake Tahoe

May 25 from Mono Lake

May 26 from Monitor Pass

May 27 from Lake Tahoe

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!

New Astrophotography Time-lapse Demo Reel

Considering watching or photographing the Orionid Meteor Shower this weekend?  Here's my latest footage of the Perseid, Geminid, Zeta Perseid and Arietid meteor showers to get you in the mood.

I was recently contacted by Kerstin Inga of Life Audience about the possibility of setting some of their music to some of my time-lapse footage.  I've accumulated a quantity of video over the past 4 years, and their song "While You Were Sleeping" from their *Wave and Particles* album seemed perfect for some of my astrophotography clips.  If you like the track, check out other songs from this album on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/wave-particles/id427106760

If you like night photography, my 2013 workshop schedule will be announced here on my blog soon.

This is the culmination of hundreds of hours and many long night of effort from everyone involved.  YouTube likes and shares are greatly appreciated by the artists.  Thank you very much! 


Note: To best see the meteors, watch this video on YouTube, first selecting a quality of 720P HD and then making it go full screen: http://youtu.be/6YOxo7uI8ns?hd=1

Did You Catch the Perseid Meteor Shower Last Weekend?

I assembled this timelapse footage form the 2009 event and posted it on YouTube, with links from Facebook and Google+, so people could plan to go catch it.  I was shocked to see 9 or 10 days later that it had over 85,000 views!



Later this year I'll be leading a workshop to help people capture an even better event, the Geminid meteor shower, from Death Valley National Park.  Now you can produce results of astronomical proportions!  We'll try to follow a mix of day and night shooting, visiting some of the unique locations I've found while writing a guide book to landscape photography locations in Southern California.  I'm also working on securing a space for classroom sessions, so we can include critical post-processing training.  As always, contact me for further details!

The Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight!

The good news is that the Geminid meteor shower peaks on the nights of December 13 and 14, so tonight one of the strongest meteor showers of the year. The bad news is that the moon rising around 8 pm tonight and 9 pm tomorrow night will interfere with the visibility of the meteors. How much will it interfere? Actually I have a video of Geminid meteor shower from past year with and without the moon in the sky which can show you the difference. Make sure you're watching this in HD, and it's best watched full scree as well: You'd definitely see more meteors without the moon, so try watching before the moon rises, but if you're up in the key viewing hours between 11am and dawn, look up in the eastward sky and you might get lucky and see a decent fireball!

How to Create a Timelapse Video of a Meteor Shower

Perseid Meteor Shower, August 2013

The Perseid Meteor Shower runs from July 17 - August 24, with peak night occurring around August 12-14. When shooting night landscapes and trying to catch meteor showers, I like taking long exposures one after another, so you catch anything which flies through your camera's field of view. If you shoot continuously for a while and catch a couple of hundred exposures or more, you can even assemble those shots into a time-lapse video.

Lets do a little math to figure out how your still shots will transfer to video. When deciding how long to shoot, bear in mind that this is a time-lapse video, so in playback as video everything is dramatically sped up. Each frame is a 5 to 30 second shot, but video is 24 or 30 frames per second. To make the meteors last more than 1/30th of a second, you may want them to be present for two frames of video, and assemble your video at a relatively slow frame rate of only 12 shots per second, so in video formats that play at 24 to 30 frames per second, the meteors show up for at least two frames. Fortunately our eyes and minds are quick enough for us to perceive the meteors with some persistence even though they show up for only 1/12th of a second.



On a dark night your exposures may be 30 seconds or more, so at 24 frames per second each hour of shooting will give you less than 5 seconds of video. With the nearly full moon last night, there was enough light that I was able to reduce my exposure time to 5 seconds. I set an external timer (intervalometer) to take the next shot one second later, so I took one very 6 seconds, or 10 shots per minute. So if I'm using a slow frame rate of 12 frames per second to make the meteors more persistent in the video, I'll end up with almost one second of video per minute of shooting. Adjust your exposures per minute and video frames per second math to figure out how fast you want your shooting sequence to play back.

If you'd like to explore time-lapse photography yourself, download the free VirtualDub software which can convert a sequence of JPEG files into video, and check out the forum on www.Timescapes.org for discussions on techniques. You'll need a tripod of course, and your sequence of still images will turn out best if you use a remote switch that has an intervalometer (timer) function.

Update March 2016: One more thing, meteors are more common after midnight, so I usually arrive on site around 11 pm to give myself an hour to set up before I have to start shooting.  Basically where you are on earth rotates around to the front of the Earth's path through space at midnight, so the sky above you collides with more comet dust from then until astronomical twilight starts before dawn, as this article explains.

Create a Timelapse Video on Your Digital Camera

Lunar Moonbows in Upper Yosemite Falls from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Timelapse videos are easy to create on your DSLR. There are many software packages which will facilitate the process, some better than others, but I'll describe the simple and relatively low cost workflow that I currently use. You'll need software on your PC which can convert a sequence of JPEG files to timelapse video. I use VirtualDub (free download) to create an AVI format video, then I use MPEG Streamclip (free download) to convert the huge .AVI file to a much smaller (albeit lower quality) MPEG-4 for online use. Here's the process from shooting to finished video:

Clean your camera sensor. It is hard enough to remove dust from one image... picture having to do that 300 times. Even copying dust removal from one image to the others, the data changes over time (from shot to shot), so it really won't work well across the whole sequence. It's far, far better to remove the dust up front. Clean your camera sensor!.

Put your camera on a sturdy tripod. Install a fully charged battery and a blank, freshly-formatted memory card which can handle several hundred images.

Compose your image expecting to lose some of the vertical information if you'll convert the sequence to HD video with a narrow HD shape (16:9 aspect ratio).

Manually focus your camera and switch off automatic focus. If you forget to do this, your camera will insert delays in the sequence as it hunts for focus, making the playback jerky at best. Worst case, your camera may lose focus and you'll end up with a whole lot of blurry images.

Make some test shots to determine best exposure. If practical, set exposure manually so it won't change from shot to shot and cause flashing (flicker) as different exposures come up during playback. If the light will change a lot during shooting (sunrise and sunset), you can use automatic exposure, but then the exposure during the video is artificially stagnant, and you'll need to to "deflicker" the timelapse to reduce flashing from frame to frame when producing the video. You will learn some very interesting and important things about your DLSR in this process! When your DSLR changes the exposure up or down 1/3 stop from shot to shot, simply "fixing" the exposure during editing will not result in similar-looking images from shot to shot! Even adjacent images taken a fraction of a second apart may have different white balance, and a slight exposure change also affects contrast, color saturation, and so on. Once you've gone through the process a few times your whole approach will change and you'll try to maximize quality and consistency in-camera, not during editing.

Shoot several hundred images in a row. You can make the timing from frame to frame consistent using an Intervalometer Trigger (external timer), or you can simply hit the shutter release over and over (perhaps use the display of the prior image on the camera rear LCD as your cue to trigger the next shot and keep them at a fairly consistent rate). Remember that your finished product will be 30 frames per second, so you'll need 300 images for each 10 seconds of video. I recommend shooting in RAW format so you can adjust the exposures during editing, especially if you shoot at sunrise or sunset where the light will change over the course of your timelapse.

Read your camera's files into your editing software and crop them to the 16:9 aspect ratio of HD video. Remember that you have far more resolution in your DSLR than you need for HD video, so you can perform a "digital zoom" and focus on only a portion of your original camera image. Software strong in batch editing such as Adobe Lightroom (free trial available) will enable you to apply a consistent crop, exposure adjustments and even spot removal across the entire sequence of images. You'll also want to impose one consistent white balance across the entire sequence. Some video processing software (such as Adobe Premiere I believe) will even let you specify a starting crop and a different finishing crop, then calculate a zoom and pan across your sequence of images.

Save your files in sRGB JPEG format at 1280 x 720 resolution for video to be used on sites like YouTube or Flickr that only allow smaller 720p HD format video, or save them at 1920 x 1080 resolution for 1080p video to be uploaded to sites such as Vimeo. If you'll use the VirtualDub software, it will want you to point to the first image in the sequence then look for a sequential numbered file, so if you used automatic exposure bracketing while shooting you may be editing and saving every third file, but you can rename them sequentially so VirtualDub can order them properly.

Read the sequence into VirtualDub. It's important to notice when trying to import them that in the dialog box where you're looking for the first file to select, the file format has a drop-down menu which enables you to specify that it should look for an image sequence in JPG format.

Add filters as desired, in the order that you want them to apply. For example, Virtualdub can crop and resize larger JPEGs, perform sharpening at the new lower resolution, and you can search for and install a third party "MSU deflicker" filter to improve image consistency from frame to frame across the whole video. Check your frame rate and for maximum quality (but shorter result) change the default 10 frames per second to 30.

Save the video in AVI format. That's a very high quality format, so it may save a file of a gigabyte or more! Enjoy this high quality file on your computer (or read it into video editing software to burn it to Blue-Ray DVD).

To create smaller files for online sharing, read your .AVI file into MPEG Streamclip. Save to MPEG-4, playing with quality vs. file size tradeoffs until the results are what you want.

Upload your results to your favorite video sharing site. That's it! It takes a little more planning to pull off well and a little more time to produce the finished result, but you can produce some amazing videos.

For more information on shooting timelapse sequences, I recommend browsing the discussion forums over on www.Timescapes.org.

Note: although Adobe Lightroom has a retail list price of $300 to buy, Adobe offers a free trial.

This is an updated re-post of my November 2010 blog post since the link to the original timelapse video on Flickr appears to have broken. Instead I've posted links to videos on Vimeo:

Pfeiffer Beach Winter Sunset from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

Owens Valley Rainbows (Timelapse Video)

Owens Valley Rainbows (Timelapse Video), originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

Rainbows I found in the Owens Valley on October 5, 2010 while scouting conditions for the Fall Colors workshop. The rainbows move across the landscape as the sun moves across the sky.

Best viewed in high definition over on Flickr!

Meteor and Milky Way over the Sierra Nevada

Meteor and Milky Way over the Sierra Nevada, originally uploaded by Jeff Sullivan (pls see msg in profile!).

A single image from a several hour, 438 frame timelapse I'm working on, taken while backpacking last Summer.

Flickr isn't accepting the HD video files I've been trying to upload this week. Vimeo.com only lets me upload one high definition file per week (I don't have a revenue stream for video to justify upgrading to unlimited), so I'm not sure when I'll a high resolution copy available. In the meantime however, you can see Vimeo's severely downgraded preview:

Sierra Nevada Milky Way Timelapse from Jeff Sullivan on Vimeo.

If this embedded player doesn't seem to play it well, try viewing it directly over on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/18260497. For low resolution previews that Vimeo downconverts from HD, I don't recommend full screen viewing.

It looks a lot better on my laptop of course, where it actually runs slower and you can see more details such as the meteor, a satellite, and so on, so I may slow down the frame rate on the next version of this that I create.

If you like my coverage of places and events, send me around the world to capture more images and timelapse videos for you to enjoy! Blog Your Way Around The World -
http://www.blogyourwayaroundtheworld.com/blogs/view/1238 The voting deadline is December 31.