Astro movie : A night at Paranal Observatory

"Three rotating galaxies"

© Stéphane Guisard and Jean Pajus

This is a time lapse movie made from individual images taken with a Canon 20Da camera and an 8mm lens (equivalent to a 13mm lens on a 35mm camera). It covers a complete night at Paranal Observatory starting at sunset and finishing at dawn and seen at 375x normal speed. The movie shows the apparent clockwise (southern hemisphere) rotation of three galaxies : our Milky Way, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud around the celestial Southern Pole. Several constellations like Orion, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Carina and The Southern Cross ...etc…are also visible.

Movie  :       Image acquisition by Stéphane Guisard and movie making by Jean Pajus.
Sounds :      "Space audio" , " Cassini Observes Saturn kilometric Radiation” courtesy Pr. Donald Gurnett, NASA and U. of IOWA

Music :       "Space Music" , "Crépuscule" by Valère Leroy, courtesy Valère Leroy

Format : The movie is available in different formats and sizes for Windows, Macintosh and even ipod users !

Download the movie from one of the following links :

960x720.wmv (26Mb) 640x480.wmv (9.5Mb) 480x360.mov (10Mb) 320x240.mp4 (3.2Mb) 720x576.avi (17Mb)

The animated gif is only a very rough preview of the movie made with only 7 images while the full movie was made from ~700 images, has nice ‘space’ music and sounds and lasts 2 minutes. We highly recommend you to download the full movie from one of the links above.

Would we have 'cumulated' the exposures on a single image, we would have obtained and image similar to this one :