The Pole has created an amazing film showing the movement of the Earth. It was enough to "cancel" the rotation of our planet

In recent days, the Internet has conquered the film by Bartosz Wojczyński. The Pole aimed his lens at the stars, but the effect is not like anything that most of us have ever seen. Nearly half a million people watched the film. No wonder: the effect is downright hypnotic. I asked the author how he made this material.

In the unique film in question, the creator stabilized the sky, not Earth. Wojczyński's work presents a complete rotation of our planet relative to the stars, 23 hours and 56 minutes. However, this is not an ordinary movie, but a sequence of photos taken with a minute interval (a break between one photo and the other) and combined using the author's method.

How was the popular film made? It was enough to "cancel" the rotation of the Earth

To make it, the creator used a full-frame Nikon D810 DSLR camera with an Irix 15 mm f / 2.4 lens. The key to making such unusual effects was the use of a special Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer head . As the creator describes it, it is a head with a drive that can "cancel" the rotation of our planet by slowly rotating in the opposite direction. This is how a similar set looks and works in practice:

The film also shows a special smooth transition from day to night.

The effect of a smooth transition from day to night is achieved manually, changing the exposure time at dusk and dawn so that it is more or less adjusted to the level of lighting. Then I smooth the jumps of brightness between successive frames using the experimental software of my own authorship.

The head used by the creator is surprisingly cheap for astrophotography equipment. However, this is a fairly basic model for light equipment. Can handle cameras with a lens up to approx. 200 mm. Larger and more expensive heads are intended for telescopes. Above you can see Wojczyński's "standard" set: the Takahashi Epsilon 130D 430 mm f / 3.3 telescope with a Nikon D810A camera, Rainbow RST-135 head and Avalon T-90 tripod. The whole costs about 55,000 zł. And this is the amount I associate more with photographing space.

Time-lapse movie was made in Namibia, on the Tivoli farm located in the Kalahari desert

This is a popular place among astrophotographers. Why there? And could such pictures be taken in Poland?

Namibia's popularity is no accident. There are optimal conditions for observing the night sky. The nearest town is several dozen kilometers away. An additional factor is the favorable climate: dry air, cloud cover of 5%. in the period May-September.

Bartosz Wojczyński visited Namibia a year ago. He also made other materials then. However, this is an unusual shot of the Milky Way passing from horizon to horizon:

The latitude of the farm is 23 ° S, i.e. relatively close to the equator. Thanks to this, the blue pole (the center of the apparent rotation of the celestial sphere) lies low above the horizon and the film is visible all the time. In Poland, creating this type of film is very difficult, because the blue pole lies high in the sky (about 52 °), which makes the horizon very large circles, impossible to cover even the widest lens .

Bartosz was also going to Namibia this year, but his plans were thwarted by a coronavirus pandemic. The next opportunity will be in less than a year, in May 2021. As Bartosz told me, the Tivoli farm is so popular among astronomers that it is necessary to reserve places about a year and a half earlier.

"I've always been interested in astronomy"

Bartosz Wojczyński deals with photography for about 10 years. Then the first camera - Nikon D5100 - fell into his hands.

At the beginning I used to play typical fashionable topics among beginners - macro photos, HDRs, etc., although I quickly switched almost exclusively to photographing the night sky. This is due to the fact that I have always been interested in astronomy and as a few years old I was absorbing books about space. Initially, I dealt with landscape astrophotography, because it is the field that requires the least equipment expenditure.

From year to year Wojczyński expanded his knowledge, but also invested in new, better equipment. This is very important because astrogotography is a very technical field of photography. The quality of the equipment used plays a key role here.

The milestone of every astrophotographer is the purchase of a parallactic assembly, i.e. a motorized head that allows following the movement of stars in the celestial sphere. Without such a device, we are limited to exposures of 20-30 seconds, for longer the stars are blurred due to the Earth's rotation. With such a drive, we can catch photons for any length of time, which significantly affects the quality of the photo.

To confirm these words, the creator shows two photographs: a 15-second photo without a drive and a 2-minute exposure with the montage following the movement of the stars. The difference can be seen with the naked eye.

The Polish artist has already delighted with his passion and photographs. A good example would be the photo of the moon, which he took from his balcony in Piekary Śląskie. This extremely accurate photo was created from a combination of 32 thousand. single images. It took him only 30 minutes to shoot, but assembling the final shot, which has 73.5 GB, cost him over 5 hours in life.

I also dealt with high resolution photography of the Moon. This is a completely different driving school than traditional SLR photography. Pictures are taken with a fast monochrome camera through color filters, and then separate channels are combined into a color picture.

In addition, Wojczyński also deals with traditional photography of deep sky objects (nebulae, galaxies), using a telescope aimed for several hours at one point in the sky. Living in Silesia is not the easiest task.

For taking this type of deep sky photography, very good observation conditions are required, i.e. a maximum dark sky. In such a large agglomeration this is not possible. Photographs of the moon can be taken from anywhere, because the moon is a very bright object.

Bartosz Wojczyński works as a programmer on a daily basis. He occasionally combines both skills. He is, among others, the author of the website transit-finder.com to search for flights of the International Space Station against the backdrop of the Sun and Moon. A site used by many sky watchers around the world.

If you want to learn a bit more about his photographic work, visit his YouTube channel, where he occasionally records the workshop "frameborder =" 0 "allowfullscreen> from astrophotography . Bartosz also conducts live lectures. I definitely recommend checking out the creator's website and his Instagram profile , where you can see more great photos of space!

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The Pole has created an amazing film showing the movement of the Earth. It was enough to "cancel" the rotation of our planet