I remember the first time I ever caught the Northern Lights on camera – I was photographing the night sky when I was startled to see a pale green “cloud” on the back of the camera that I couldn’t see with my eyes. But NASA astronaut Jonny Kim recently shared his first-ever attempt at taking a time-lapse – and it’s quite impressive.
The timelapse, shared on the astronaut’s social media pages, shows a time-lapse of Earth taken from the International Space Station. The sped-up video starts with city lights and even some flashes of lightning seen from space, but ends with colorful wisps dancing over Southeast Asia and Australia as the Aurora Australis or Southern Lights makes an appearance at the end of the timelapse.
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Kim notes in the post that he’s never shot a time-lapse before, but took some tips from “Vapor,” Nichole Ayes, a fellow NASA astronaut also aboard the ISS.
“After seeing the result, I told her this felt like fishing,” Kim wrote. “Prepping the camera, the angle, the settings, the mount, then setting your timer and coming back to hope you got a catch. And after catching my first fish, I think I’m hooked.”
As someone who has spent many sleepless nights trying to catch the aurora on camera, I agree with the comparison. Sometimes, I leave with nothing but a few photos of stars. Other times, I leave with some of my favorite landscape images that I’ve ever taken (plus an adrenaline rush from the chase).
Kim arrived on the ISS on April 8 and is expected to spend around eight months aboard.
A time-lapse is a series of still images taken at regular intervals, stitched together into a video. The result is a sped-up video, sort of like the opposite of a slow-motion video. (A few commenters missed this fact; the Earth actually isn’t spinning as fast as it appears to be in the video.)
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One of the most common mistakes creatives make when taking their first time lapse is not taking enough shots and ending up with a too short video. A tripod is also a must. For more insight into creating timelapses, read DCW’s guide on how to create time-lapses. Or, read about how to photograph the northern lights or what night sky events to photograph this June.
