PanSTARRS comet time lapse

March 14th, 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

I made this time lapse video of the PanSTARRS comet last night from just north of Hytop, Alabama. It gets noisy near the end due to the fixed exposure setting combined with a darkening sky. Taken with a Canon 5D Mk II, with a Canon 70-200 mm lens (200 mm at f2.8), ISO=250, 2.5 sec exposures taken every 4 seconds, HDR processing with Photomatix.

PanSTARRS comet time lapse video


11 Responses to “PanSTARRS comet time lapse”

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  1. Andy says:

    Stunning!
    In which way (using which application) did you create the video from the the single exposure?

    • Roy Spencer says:

      There were about 400 photos, and I used Photoshop to export the batch of them to an AVI video, with no compression. Then Vimeo.com performs a compression to display the final video…otherwise it’s a 1.1 GB file.

  2. Gary says:

    That’s better than standing out in the cold to watch the real thing. Nice video.

  3. Morley Sutter says:

    Dear Dr Spencer:

    OT, but what has happened to the website AMSU-A Tmeperature Trends from NASA’s AQUA, URL
    http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/amsutemps/execute.csh
    amsutemps+011?

    Over several days, all I get is the following message when I try to access the site:

    Not Found

    The requested URL /amsutemps/execute.csh was not found on this server.

    Apache Server at ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov Port 80.

    Yours sincerely,
    Morley Sutter

  4. Sparks says:

    Nice! I was hoping to get to see it in two hours time, but it’s raining.

  5. Congratulations Dr. Spencer! Good movie.
    I saw comet PanSTARRS 2013 A1 last night for the first time after being frustrated by south-Florida clouds for three nights in a row.
    Binoculars did the trick.

  6. Dale Johnson says:

    Looks real good Roy. Maybe I should take up this hobby too.

  7. Nick says:

    I missed this one here in the cloud-covered UK – many thanks for this splendid video that makes up for it. As Gary said, it is much warmer viewing your video on the laptop by a log fire than standing outside in subzero temps!

  8. Wow, marvelous blog layout! How long have you been blogging for?

  9. Wow, marvelous blog layout! How long have you been blogging for?

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