kottke.org posts about time lapse
Using thousands of photos taken by NASA astronauts Butch Wilmor and Don Pettit earlier this year from the International Space Station, Seán Doran made this incredible timelapse called Light Fantastic.
21,837 images across 18 time-lapse sequences photographed by NASA astronauts Don Pettit and Butch Wilmore on January 1st, 4th, 5th and February 1st of 2025 are repaired, remastered and retimed to create 3x real time video footage. A method called frame interpolation is used to calculate the extra video frames required to re-create the smooth motion of ISS orbiting Earth. A real-time version of the film would be 4 hours 9 minutes and 30 seconds long.
The video captures incredible auroras, moonsets, nighttime city views, sunrises, and even more auroras, all set to the music of Chris Zabriskie.
Watch a stone pine grow from a seed harvested from a pinecone into a small tree, a 2-year growth period compressed into just 110 seconds through the ✨magic✨ of time lapse photography. Don’t you snicker…it is magic! Its invention in the 1870s made it possible to observe, study, and appreciate objects and events in entirely new ways — it’s literal time travel.
This 4K drone video from @liulangCooki takes us on a journey from the base camp at 17,400 feet all the way to the summit of Mount Everest. Along the way, you can see tiny little people hiking up and the paths they take. Very cool.
Myles Zhang, a PhD candidate in architectural history, created this drawing of Manhattan’s Chinatown several years ago.
Chinatown’s tenements are in the foreground, while the skyscraper canyons of Lower Manhattan rise above. This shows the area of Chinatown bordered by Bowery, Canal Street, and Columbus Park.
It took him around 60 hours to complete; he made a time lapse video of its creation:
There’s a very large scan of the image that’s worth looking at.
Ok, I did not know this, and it’s blowing my mind: we have been imaging exoplanets for such a long time that scientists have made time lapse movies of their motion around their stars. This one is a 12-year time lapse of four planets orbiting a star called HR 8799 (images from 2009-2021):
And this one of Beta Pictoris b covers a time period of 17 years (2003-2020):
HR 8799 is 133.3 light-years away from Earth and Beta Pictoris is 63.4 light-years away. That’s amazing! (via @philplait.bsky.social)
This is a compilation of dozens of time lapses of plant growth, from seed to fruit in many cases. The plants featured include strawberry, avocado, tobacco, ginger, oak tree, cauliflower, potato, kiwi, and several types of mushroom (not a plant). The climbers (kiwi, peas) are so cool — their vines whipping around trying to find purchase. The thai basil was one of my favorites…watching all the delicate little flowers popping out in sequence up the branches is really lovely.
Well, the total solar eclipse was once again completely awesome. I didn’t have to go chasing all over tarnation this time, the telescope worked out amazingly well, and I got to share it with a bunch of first-timers, both in-person and via text. I’m going to share some thoughts, photos, and videos from others around the internet in an even bloggier fashion than usual. Here we go.
My pal Noah Kalina got one of my favorite shots of the day (see also + prints are available):
Gobsmacking shot from Rami Ammoun…it’s a blend of multiple exposures so you can see the sun and moon at the same time. Love this shot.
And another stunner from Andrew McCarthy:
Ryan Cox got some great shots of the solar prominences during totality.
Quick solar prominence explainer interlude: if you had a clear look at totality, you may have noticed some orange bits poking out around the moon. NASA: What is a solar prominence?
A solar prominence (also known as a filament when viewed against the solar disk) is a large, bright feature extending outward from the Sun’s surface. Prominences are anchored to the Sun’s surface in the photosphere, and extend outwards into the Sun’s hot outer atmosphere, called the corona. A prominence forms over timescales of about a day, and stable prominences may persist in the corona for several months, looping hundreds of thousands of miles into space. Scientists are still researching how and why prominences are formed.
The red-glowing looped material is plasma, a hot gas comprised of electrically charged hydrogen and helium. The prominence plasma flows along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo. An erupting prominence occurs when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing the plasma.
A timelapse video of totality from Scientific American:
Thomas Fuchs caught some sunspots through his telescope during the partial eclipse. (We saw these through our ‘scope as well.)
Quick sunspot explainer interlude. NASA: What exactly is a sunspot?
A sunspot is simply a region on the surface of the sun-called the photosphere-that is temporarily cool and dark compared to surrounding regions. Solar measurements reveal that the average surface temperature of the sun is 6000° Celsius and that sunspots are about 1500° Celsius cooler than the area surrounding them (still very hot), and can last anywhere from a few hours to a few months. Sunspots expand and contract as they move across the surface of the sun and can be as large as 80,000 km in diameter.
Sunspots are magnetic regions on the sun with magnetic field strengths thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, and often appear in pairs that are aligned in an east-west direction. One set will have a positive or north magnetic field while the other set will have a negative or south magnetic field. The field is strongest in the darker parts of the sunspots — called the umbra. The field is weaker and more horizontal in the lighter part-the penumbra. Overall, sunspots have a magnetic field that is about 1000 times stronger than the surrounding photosphere.
This Instagram account has a lovingly assembled collection of solar eclipse stamps from around the world (Aruba, Bhutan, Chile, Romania, Kenya, and even North Korea).
A NY Times timelapse: See the Total Solar Eclipse’s Shadow From Space (assembled from NASA and NOAA satellite imagery).
Great solar prominences on this shot from Notorious RBMK. Wow:
A timelapse video from Ariel Waldman of totality in Mazatlán. You really get a sense of the eclipse as a passing shadow from this.
Incredible “tiny planet” panorama timelapse by Matt Biddulph. Here’s a still frame during totality:
The 8 types of eclipse photo from XKCD.
The view of the eclipse from the International Space Station.
More photos from The Dammich, fotoelliott, max GORDON, good thread of photos, and photo round-ups from PetaPixel, New Scientist, BBC Science Focus, Mashable, Associated Press, and Wired.
Video from Nate Luebbe of the moment of totality, with Baily’s beads and solar prominences.
This is a fake. Super super cool looking, but a fake. (Update: not quite a fake, just a really badly enhanced version of this composite HDR photo.) And I’m not sure I entirely trust the veracity of the trending search results for “why do my eyes hurt” but here it is anyway.
Earth Will Have Its Last Total Solar Eclipse in About 600 Million Years:
Total solar eclipses occur because the moon and the sun have the same apparent size in Earth’s sky — the sun is about 400 times wider than the moon, but the moon is about 400 times closer.
But the moon is slowly moving away from Earth by about 1-1/2 inches (4 centimeters) per year, according to the NASA statement. As a result, total solar eclipses will cease to exist in the very distant future, because the apparent size of the moon in Earth’s sky will be too small to cover the sun completely.
“Over time, the number and frequency of total solar eclipses will decrease,” Vondrak said in the statement. “About 600 million years from now, Earth will experience the beauty and drama of a total solar eclipse for the last time.”
If you want to get a headstart on trip planning, the next eclipse is going to be in Greenland, Iceland, and Spain on August 12, 2026. Cloud cover looks most favorable in Spain.
Ok, that’s all for now. Depending on what else I come across, I might update this post periodically throughout the day. I know some of you who were lucky enough to see the total eclipse shared your experiences in the comments of yesterday’s post but feel free to do so here as well.
I’ve always been a little fascinated by the list of the largest cities throughout history, so this animated version from Ollie Bye is right up my alley. While watching, it’s interesting to think about what makes cities grow large at specific times: a mixture of economics, demography, social movements, empire/colonialism, technology, and the like.
This is a cool thing I had not seen before: Chronolog. Since 2017, they’ve been helping organizations document environments over time by compiling photos taken by visitors, who then get sent information about the area they’ve visited. Here’s how it works:
Changes in our environment are difficult to see and understand because they happen gradually, but long term monitoring projects are expensive and complex. Chronolog solves this problem by connecting communities with land stewards to create crowd-sourced time lapses of important natural areas.
Chronolog’s mission is twofold: First, to engage people with nature in an interactive new way. Second, to keep a record of phenological change for scientific use. By making environmental conservation a collaborative activity, people become interested in participating and compelled by the findings.
Millions of years ago, the supercontinent of Pangea slowly started to break apart into the continents we all live on today. In this video from the makers of ArcGIS mapping software, you can watch as the reconfiguration of the Earth’s land happens over 200 million years.
Damn, India slammed into Asia like the Kool-aid Man — no wonder the Himalayas are so tall!
Once, the craggy limestone peaks that skim the sky of Everest were on the ocean floor. Scientists believe it all began to change about 200 million years ago — at around the time the Jurassic dinosaurs were beginning to emerge — when the supercontinent of Pangea cracked into pieces. The Indian continent eventually broke free, journeying north across the vast swathe of Tethys Ocean for 150 million years until it smacked into a fellow continent — the one we now know as Asia — around 45 million years ago.
The crushing force of one continent hitting another caused the plate beneath the Tethys Ocean, made of oceanic crust, to slide under the Eurasian plate. This created what is known as a subduction zone. Then the oceanic plate slipped deeper and deeper into the Earth’s mantle, scraping off folds limestone as it did so, until the Indian and Eurasian plates started compressing together. India began sliding under Asia, but because it’s made of tougher stuff than the oceanic plate it didn’t just descend. The surface started to buckle, pushing the crust and crumples of limestone upwards.
And so the Himalayan mountain range began to rise skyward. By around 15-17 million years ago, the summit of Everest had reached about 5,000m (16,404ft) and it continued to grow. The collision between the two continental plates is still happening today. India continues to creep north by 5cm (2in) a year, causing Everest to grow by about 4mm (0.16in) per year (although other parts of the Himalayas are rising at around 10mm per year [0.4in]).
See also Map of Pangaea with Modern-Day Borders, How the Earth’s Continents Will Look 250 Million Years From Now, and Locate Modern Addresses on Earth 240 Million Years Ago. (via open culture)
Lego master Jumpei Mitsui spent over 400 hours building a 3D version of Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa out of 50,000 Lego bricks — you can watch a time lapse of the construction in the video above. The build was included at an exhibition of Hokusai’s work at the MFA in Boston:
In order to create Hokusai’s Wave in three dimensions, he made a detailed study of rogue waves and their characteristics. He also drew on childhood memories of waves near his family home at Akashi on the Inland Sea.
The video slows down to realtime in spots, so you can see how fast he’s actually building (quite fast). And you can also see the level of trial and error involved as he builds and then un-builds the waves until he’s happy with them. (via the kid should see this)
About once a year, boat owners on Wisconsin’s Lake Chippewa gather to move a small floating island from blocking access under a bridge. It’s a simple application of Newtonian physics: the boats all just nose into the island, gun their motors, and slowly shove the island out of the way.
The floating clump of mud and plant material is technically a bog, not an island, but it’s hefty enough to support the growth of trees all the same. Looking at it, you could easily believe it was a fully-fledged island. That is… until it starts drifting around.
“It’s one of the first things you look for when you come out here in the morning; where’s the bog?” Denny Reyes, owner of The Landing in Chippewa, told Arizona News.
The problematic bog is actually one of many, but it’s one of the biggest and close to a bridge that can get blocked when it goes for a wander. In 2022, with the wind on their side, it took around 25 boats to budge the bog and collectively push it back out into the lake.
For eight years, Keith Loutit captured hundreds of thousands of images of Singapore, combining the pulsing energy, the new buildings reaching for the sky, and the busy shipyard of one of Asia’s most iconic and futuristic cities into this 5-minute timelapse video.
When we pass by landscapes they appear fixed in time but they change around us constantly. Singapore has gone through an incredible change over the past 8 years, and I have tried to capture as much of this change as possible. There were no permanent cameras used in this film, it required regular site visits over 988 shoot days and over 3300 matched shots.
The video is also available on Vimeo and you can watch two previous Singapore timelapses by Loutit here and here. (via moss and fog)
Eternal Spring is a short timelapse film by Christopher Dormoy featuring beautiful shots of melting snow and ice. Watching this, it is difficult not to think of the climate crisis, which is of course the whole point.
Ice is a beautiful element I love to work with in my video projects. I wanted to feature the ice melting aspect in timelapse process to illustrate the phenomenon of global warming. Melting ice is beautiful and symbolizes spring, but it can also symbolize a problematic aspect of our climate.
And wow, that shot of the Moon at the halfway point… (via colossal)
So you’ve seen how an 18th century sailing battleship was built. But that was for a vessel 227 feet long that could carry around 850 people. This timelapse video shows the construction of a much larger ship: a modern-day, 1,100-foot-long cruise ship that houses 6,600 passengers. The size of this thing is just ridiculous, bordering on the obscene. It took me a second to realize that the giant thing they were constructing in the first minute of the video is in fact an engine, which, when compared to the rest of the ship, is not that big at all. Make sure you watch to the end to see the oddball paint job on the bow.
See also a timelapse of a second ship of this class being built, which focuses on different details. (via core77)
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