I went out and shot some time lapse this afternoon in my town. This is the result of one hour of tape. I used a telescope computerized pan head for the slow pans.

Please excuse the crudity of the edits, I exported this project before I rendered it. I never actually watched it until the final export. I will do many more of these. This was just a test. I know what looks good and bad now by watching this video.

The model of the telescope is the Celestron Nexstar 114GT. I used eight AA batteries to produce 12 volts of power and the system comes with a remote control to enter star data. I simply set the rate to 1-9 (1 slowest) and hold down the left or right buttons. I then yank the data line and the head keeps on panning until I pull the power source. Another option would be using a spring clamp on the remote to hold down the left or right arrow.

The system does tilt, but there is a built in clutch that disables the gear system so that the cogs don’t strip when force is applied. The camera and Letus contraption is just to heavy to do more than a 5 degree tilt up or down.

I shot this in Franklin and surprisingly, nobody bothered me. A few cop cars moved slowly past me, but none stopped. In this day and age, seeing a guy with a camera mounted on a contraption with wires and battery packs hanging off it could raise terror suspicion.

The video was edited with Final Cut Pro and I used a filter effect to add more color saturation. I did not vignette this project. This entire short was shot through a Letus35 Extreme with a 85mm f1.4 lens. The frame rate was set to 8 fps or 15 fps on the camera.

Music Selection: Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts II - Track 18
Special thanks to: TJ Powers for helping me get this idea off the ground.