Equinox | 28 | 2.8 | #28

Today’s photo is just a quick shot at the edge of darkness:

The real action today was to celebrate the Vernal Equinox with a time-lapse movie of sunset. I was playing around with SunCalc recently, and found a Stonehenge-like alignment on our property. On the equinoxes, the sun sets behind our radio tower, when viewed from Good Ol' Rock. I decided to make a movie of this sunset.

Because my Pentax K10D doesn’t have a built-in intervalometer function, I used the experimental PK Tether software on my netbook. I’ve had trouble using the software with intervals that are too short, because of the time required to read the images over USB. But tonight I set it to shoot every 15 seconds, and it did fine. Better yet, it lets you change the exposure settings without disrupting the timed sequence.

That capability let me bite off more than I could chew… I extended the movie by increasing exposure, intending to fix it in LRTimelapse when I assembled the movie. This works, sort of, but my adjustments were too extreme, and I had trouble getting adjacent frames to match in Lightroom. So, it’s not perfect.

Finally, while I think the sun does set behind the tower, it’s kind of hard to tell because of the trees and terrain that obscure the true horizon. So, meh. It was a learning experience if nothing else.

Here's a bonus: A stitched panorama of Mine 40 that I didn't get to process with the rest of yesterday's photos.

This was stitched in Hugin from 9 vertical exposures. If you click the image and go to Flickr, I’ve marked the town, the power houses, the bony piles, and the wash house that I explored yesterday. You can also see a much larger version on Flickr.