April 29, 2013

This is a shot I’m very excited to share! It has taken many years of research and development to pull it off. I would like to publicly thank Promote Systems and Type & Colour for helping me with this project by going above and beyond typical customer service and adding many custom, advanced features to the Promote Control and Panoneed robotic head. Definitely check their products out!

For quite a while I have wanted to take a spherical panorama timelapse. This night shot completes one of the major objectives to achieving this challenging goal. This image represents a timelapse consisting of 41 stitched panoramas. Every panorama is made up of 6 images, each 15 seconds long. I only shot the upper hemisphere to cut down on time since the ground was underexposed anyway. The individual hemispheres took 2 minutes and 8 seconds to shoot. This is what is causing the gaps in the star trails. I used a 14mm rectilinear lens; I would have to get a 16mm or wider fisheye to take less than 6 photos to cover the whole sky and decrease the gaps. I stitched one panorama with PTGui Pro using the .xml positioning file from the Panoneed and batched it out to all the rest as a template. The accuracy of the Panoneed is nothing short of astounding! I overlapped the first panorama of the timelapse with the last one, zoomed into 300%, and there wasn’t even a pixel-length difference in alignment from motor drift. The Panoneed is truly a precision tool.

I realize that 41 frames aren’t anywhere near long enough for a timelapse video (it’s only 2 seconds long), but it makes for wonderful star trails! The timelapse was cut short when the camera battery died after nearly an hour and a half of keeping the shutter open. I can’t use my vertical shutter grip and extended battery with the motorized head to get through an entire evening like I do with static timelapses. It’s not a matter of weight, the Panoneed handles it fine at a higher torque setting, it’s that I can’t get the camera centered over the tripod with the vertical grip installed. I have since rigged up a 12v to 7.5v step-down converter to power the camera all night long.

Click the preview photo to see the virtual tour.