Amazing Timelapse Video Using Stabilized Images of the Sky That Captures 24 Hours of the Earth’s Rotation

Astrophotographer Bartosz Wojczynski used stabilized images of the Namibian night sky to capture the rotation of the Earth. He pointed his elaborate camera towards the south celestial pole and adjusted the exposure levels as needed. The entire filming process took over 23 hours and 56 minutes at one frame per minute and was smoothed out by proprietary software. Wojczynski compressed the footage into a 24 minute timelapse loop.

Taken in Tivoli, Namibia. Exposure ramped from 1/2000 sec to 30 sec depending on the time of the day, day to night transitions smoothed out using my own experimental software. The mount rotation and exposure sequence with one-minute intervals were completely automatic. I had to manually ramp exposure times at dawn and twilight in relation to the changing level of illumination, but the day to night transition happens very quickly at low African latitudes, so it took maybe 2 hours in total.