Astro Timelapses with OM System
Milkyway and Meteor at dusk, West Virginia
Occasionally I get to spend a few nights away from the city lights. When I do, I enjoy bringing my cameras out to shoot the stars. I got another chance recently. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on the trip though. I wouldn’t be able to sit by the camera all night doing a holy grail timelapse.
I did some research ahead of time and came up with a basic plan:
Initial plan
Leave my OM-1 mark 2 with a 7-14mm f/2.8 lens on a tripod late afternoon
Set it up with a delayed timelapse scheduled to start one hour before sunset (sunset was about 8:30, started timelapse at 7:40)
Set metering mode to Spot/Hi in the sky, perhaps near the setting sun
Use P mode with Auto-ISO set to 6400 max ISO and 8 seconds max shutter
Raw only / no timelapse video (to preserve battery)
Use HLD-10 grip for twice the battery life, maybe going as long as 6 hours
I choose P mode instead of Aperture priority because I like the idea of more depth of field during the day, and less in the dark (where foreground is mostly silhouette).
Image without noise reduction, ISO 6400
How it went
The timelapse kicked off at 7:40 right on schedule.
Exposure started at f/5.0, 1/100, ISO 200
P mode dropped both shutter and aperture together
f/4.0, 1/60, ISO 200 @ 8:15pm
f/2.8, 1/30, ISO 200 @ 8:23pm
f/2.8, 1 sec, ISO 200 @ 8:45pm
f/2.8, 8 sec, ISO 200 @ 8:54pm
f/2.8, 8 sec, ISO 6400 @ 9:12pm (I expected it to stop here, but it kept increasing shutter)
f/2.8, 20 sec, ISO 6400 @ 9:18pm
f/2.8, 30 sec, ISO 6400 @ 9:27pm
f/2.8, 40 sec, ISO 6400 @ 10pm
f/2.8, 50 sec, ISO 6400 @ 11:12pm
The sunset wasn’t spectacular. It was a little hazy, there was just a little color on the horizon.
The first stars started to be visible around 9:06
The milky way started to be visible around 9:27 (about an hour after sunset)
Timelapse went until 11:20, about 3.5 hours
Turns out I had the HLD-10 grip but forgot to put the battery back after charging it up!
7:42pm - 1/100, f/5, ISO 200
10:53pm - 40 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400
Lessons Learned
Don’t use Spot/Hi mode. In that mode, the maximum shutter doesn’t seem to be respected. In other modes (not highlight/shadow preserving), it seems to respect the max shutter.
Make sure the grip has a battery!
Make sure your camera clock is correct (learned this during some practice runs). Make sure daylight savings time is correct if you plan to rely on the camera’s clock for calculating timelapse delay.
Processing
I processed the timelapse using free version of LR timelapse. I had more than 400 frames, so had to abandon some. I struggled with flicker in the end result. Some haze and clouds blew through the scene, and a distant floodlight also changed foreground illumination some.
Eventually I think I got it under control doing these two things:
I set a reference area in the foreground (excluding areas of cloud transit)
I re-processed the keyframes to use mostly tone curve and avoid dehaze, clarity, and blacks/whites.
I learned these edits can introduce variation between frames and cause flicker
I also learned AI denoise and other AI driven features don’t work with LR timelapse. Thus processing the keyframes in Lightroom isn’t quite like normal photo processing. It’s more like a heavily restricted editing workflow using the basic tools I used in Aperture a decade ago.