Artist Ken Murphy has used a compact camera, a Canon firmware hack, and a motorized telescope mount to create, panoramic time-lapse movies.
Murphy shot two movies, one with a Canon A590 and the other with a Canon G12—both point-and-shoot compact cameras. He installed the CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) software on the cameras, amd programed them to take photographs every five seconds. The cameras were mounted on a panning telescope mount ($250) which slowly rotated the camera 360 degrees. A full rotation took 60 to 90 minutes.
“The camera (a Canon A590 with CHDK installed) snapped an image every five seconds while the motorized mount slowly rotated, making a single rotation in 90 minutes. I assembled the images into this panoramic movie, in which each “pane” is actually the same movie, slightly offset in time. The panes combine to make a single 360-degree view.”
“For this I used my new Canon G12, also running CHDK. I used the camera’s built-in neutral density filter and shot 2-second exposures at roughly 5-second intervals, as I wanted people and passing cars to blur out a bit. The camera made two full rotations in two hours.”
Read more: http://www.murphlab.com/2011/07/07/panoramic-time-lapse-movies/
Murphy has also been working on his History of the Sky project, where an image of the sky is being captured every 10 seconds from a camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium, on the edge of San Francisco Bay. More: http://www.murphlab.com/hsky/
