I wrote something for BYO magazine

A couple of months ago I was contacted by Brew Your Own magazine, asking whether I could write a project article on my ‘Tun Cosy’ design.

Time-sliced #SuperBloodMoon lunar eclipse 2015

Time slices spanning 2.5 hours (left-to-right) of the latter part of September’s ‘super blood moon’ eclipse. 156 shots, 60 s apart.

Following on from my cloudy solar eclipse time-slice in March this year, I thought I’d try a lunar one (clear skies!) using my fledgling ‘tslice’ Python module.

Time-slice photography with Python (and the 2015 solar eclipse)

Time slices spanning three hours (left-to-right) of a very cloudy solar eclipse!

There was a solar eclipse in March, and all I saw was cloud.  I was prepared for this, of course, what with living in the UK these days.  But all was not lost!  I still got a photograph (indirectly) of the whole thing in the form of this time-slice, which shows a period of about three hours from left to right.  I wrote a Python script to do all the legwork for me, which I’ve put on GitHub should anyone want it.

Transit of Venus light curve: exoplanet detection demo

Ok, so Venus isn’t an extrasolar planet (exoplanet), but I thought this would be a cool thing to try.  A while ago I put together a time-lapse movie of the 2012 Transit of Venus.  More recently, during a public talk on exoplanets, I saw a video someone had made to demonstrate the transit method used to detect planets around other stars.  The video looked a bit like my time-lapse, except that it was a simulation.  I thought, “why not try to get a real light curve from my transit footage?”

A History of the British Sky

I have compiled the following time-lapse video, inspired by Ken Murphy’s “A History of the Sky”.  Ken’s time-lapse is actually a mosaic of 360 smaller individual movies, each showing the San Francisco sky throughout a single day.  The result is a brilliant and unique visualisation of an entire year of weather in just a few minutes.

I present Her Majesty’s equivalent, “A History of the British Sky”, recorded from the top of a building near the Welsh border.  I’m sure you’ll agree that the time taken to process over 3 million individual photographs is repaid ten times over in this video.  Such a wealth of information in one view; it’s a feast for the eyes.  You can see the change in the length of the British day, for example. And you can clearly pick out the season of summer.

EDIT: Positive responses to A History of the British Sky:

“I always knew you could get different shades of grey, but never so many different types of grey.” -Gordon

“I can see summer! It’s up in the top-right!” -Tina

“This particular year looks drier than most.” -Margaret

Seriously though, I’d like to thank Ken for his original and actually genuine creation, which, unlike my version, took an awful lot of commitment and skill to pull off.  Such a cool idea!

Fireworks in water

85 mm; f/11; 2.0 s; ISO 100

I had my camera with an 85mm lens on it at a fireworks display last weekend.  Not the easiest focal length for fireworks and I didn’t have a tripod either, so I tried something a bit different and got the fireworks reflected in the harbour.  Some of them look quite funky!

Frothy coffees of 2012

I’m pretty much fuelled by coffee, but last year I developed an extra habit: whenever I was served a fancy frothy coffee at a café (you know.. cappuccino and the like), I would take a photo with my iPhone.  And here they are in date order!

Astrocinemagraphy (not a real term)

Here, I just had a stab at making a cinemagraph of the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) using frames from colleague Ángel R. López-Sánchez‘ excellent time-lapse movie “A 2dF night at the Anglo-Australian Telescope”.  Ángel is an astrophysicist at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) and spends a lot of time using the AAT for his research.

As for the image, I made it with Adobe After Effects.

Aligning sun images using Python

Fix it in post. It’s a common phrase in photography and one which is widely recognised as landing you in hot water if you’re not careful. Fix it in post-production, fix it after the fact. “Hm, I’ll just fix that in post.”

Well when I spent a day taking a few hundred photos of Venus crossing the sun last year with the intention of creating a time-lapse but without a tracking system, “fix it post” was my mantra by necessity. For 7 hours I followed the sun across the sky just by nudging my camera mount this way or that. As a result the sun was in a different place in every photo. The fact I wasn’t standing on the equator at the time meant it rotated too.

Transit of Venus 2012 time-lapse

Venus passed in front of the sun on 6th June 2012, and all the while I was happily photographing it from tropical North Queensland.  Here is the time-lapse of all the photos I took throughout the day.  The music is by Kevin Macleod – thanks Kevin!