Trippy 360-degree timelapse panorama of night sky

Our friend, photographer Vincent Brady created this timelapse using images form cold, dark, sleepless nights under awe-spiring skies. The music is composed and recorded Brandon McCoy.

Here’s what Vincent has to say about his planetary panorama:

While experimenting with different photography tricks and techniques back in 2012, I was shooting 360 degree panoramas in the daytime and long exposures of the stars streaking in the sky at night. It suddenly became clear that the potential to combine the two techniques could be a trip!

Since the Earth is rotating at a steady 1,040 mph I created a custom rig of 4 cameras with fisheye lenses to capture the entire night-sky in motion. Thus the images show the stars rotating around the north star, rising in the east, setting in the west, as well as the effect of the southern pole. The 4 lenses are wide enough to capture the entire night sky and a 360 degree panorama of the scene on Earth. Each camera is doing nonstop long exposures, typically about 1 minute consecutively for the life of the camera battery. Usually about 3 hours. I then made a script to stitch all the thousands of these panoramas into this time-lapse.

Thanks so much for sharing this with us Vincent! See more photos by Vincent Brady