In December 2014 and June 2015, I was lucky enough to visit La Silla in Chile. Part of the European Southern Observatory, La Silla is home to dozens of working telescopes. My baby for both occasions was the 1.2m Swiss Telescope, designed specifically to search for exoplanet via the radial velocity technique.

I also happen to enjoy photography (some of my work is here), so turned my camera to the skies most nights during both my two-week stays. This video is the result of nearly 10,000 photos taken on those trips. Hope you enjoy it! Feel free to share it far and wide.

Technical details:

I was using a Nikon D3200, a remote shutter (although when this broke, an elastic band over the shutter did the job), a Hama tripod and both the basic Zeiko 18-52mm lens and Sigma 12-24mm wide-angle lens. I also used my GoPro occasionally for the twilight sequences.

In total, I took around 10,000 photos totally around 200GB of photos. Exposure times were from 25 to 40 seconds and ISO levels from 400 to 1600. In total, I ended up with about 60 sequences of ~1hr in length, totaling 1.5 days of shutter open time!  The first batch (from December 2014) went on a hard-drive that later broke, so a few dozen other timelapses were lost. I used UFRaw to reduce the images convert to jpg, Panolapse to create the moving timelapses and Lightworks to assemble the video.

I’m not happy with all of the images; some have been poorly reduced, some were set at too high an ISO rate (made worse by the poor noise properties of the D3200). But this is my first (or maybe second) venture into Astrophotography, so I figure I’m allowed to make a few mistakes!

The music is Modern Drift by Efterklang, all rights for which are the property of 4AD & Rumraket (used under fair use guidelines).

EDIT: The video was, unfortunately, taken down by Vimeo for not constituting ‘Fair Use’ (I believed that a non-profit, educational video such as this adhered to Fair Use, but apparently vimeo disagree). It is now up on Youtube who have a less stringent fair use policy.