Time lapse with a GoPro

I’ve a long standing interested both in experimental photography and time lapse photography. Back in October I picked up a new GoPro camera in the hope of using it for astrophotography, but it tuns out to be rather unsuited to that. The GoPro Hero 3, does have a time lapse mode though, so I’ve been playing with this recently.

Taking one frame every 5 seconds, a fully charged GoPro battery only lasts around 3 hours, it also drains the battery even if you’ve connected external power via the USB charge socket, once the battery is drained, the camera shuts down. The trick for longer recording is to remove the battery from the camera, and just run from power supplied to the USB charging socket.

I’ve had good results with a Samsung branded in-car (cigar lighter) phone charger connected to a 10 Ah sealed lead-acid battery. With this I’ve been able to record for over six hours.

The next project is to get the GoPro powered when in its waterproof case. Then I can leave it recording in all sorts of conditions. This will either mean drilling a hole in the case to feed a wire, of making up some kind of flat ribbon cable that can pass though the seals.

For now, here’s an eight hour time lapse, taken a few days ago. It’s just a shot from the upstairs window, if you look carefully in the first few minutes, you can see frost evaporating from roofs in the sun and the moon crossing the sky in the right corner.

Nine Years

So, nine years of affable-lurking. That’s a lot longer than I thought I’d keep this up. Not that sporadically updating a website is particularly hard work.

The domain started as a laugh, a feeble ‘joke / pun’ for those in the know, then having paid for the domain for two years, putting some content here seemed like the thing to do. Nine years ago, blogging was all the rage, so let’s install some software and start writing. Well, I got the software installed, then kind of stalled at the second part. Most of what I’m interested in interests few other people, and what of that I do document goes on another site.

Perhaps I’ll make the tenth year of this site worth reading?

Stacking

I’ve been playing with some time-lapse photography lately. There’s really two things you can do with time-lapse, make a video, or stack the images and get a single dynamic image.

I’ve done the latter of the two in this image. It’s around a thousand images taken at five-second intervals over the course of a few hours. The stacking software is StarStaX 0.6 in Lighten blending mode. The moon ends up horribly over-exposed because the camera’s exposure is automatically set for the dark skies and low light of the stars and aircraft.
A few hours of fireworks, aircraft, stars and the moon.

Prime Time (-ish)

Today at 2:03:05, the date and time, if you write it in a particular form, is a string of the first six prime numbers: 02:03:05:07:11:13

This only works if you use DD/MM/YY format for the date, and not the American MM/DD/YY, or the more sensible YYYY/MM/DD format.

So, just after lunch take a look at the clock and ponder this celestial / mathematics alignment.