NLC 13-07-09 Animation added 5.9Mb

[Ant]

I had a complete nightmare evening last night and whilst on the phone pacing the garden I was standing on chairs and tables to see north.

I've only seen NLC once before and that wasn't very good, but last night I could see some...

So after the phone calls, I set the camera and tripod up and moved the the front of the house.

I've taken 178 images - about 30 minutes worth I guess. I'm going to make an animation, but thought that I would post an image.

This one was taken about mid way through - so around 10:30 - 10:35 ish.

I didn't like the foreground so I cropped it out. I quite like the aspect ratio of the shot...

After taking these images I saw the ISS go over, then watched Jupiter and the moon rise. That more than made up for the Rubbish part of the evening.

Hope you enjoy.

Ant

[Beyond_Vision]

Glad you got to see it good and proper and thanks for sharing it with us.

Regards

Kevin

[jgs001]

Nice one Ant. It looks like another good show last night.

[Psychobilly]

Very nice Ant...

Thanks to the MESS OFFICE i got glimpses of them through the "Non Existent Cloud" which cleared in between the two NLC shows but cloud during both

Peter....

[afm038]

Ant,

Nice capture. I agree with your comment about the aspect ratio, I think it makes the clouds look more like what you see by eye.

Sadly I was clouded out here in Lincs, disapointing after Sundays show.

Andy

[Herakles]

Great image , really looking forward to the animation.

[Ant]

OK spent several hours cropping re-sizing and sorting the animation...

Here it is.

It's 178 images taken between 22:21 and 22:54 - so on average that's one every 10 seconds or so.

There are a few larger gaps, but only a few...

Click on the image for a slightly larger one.

Cheers

Ant

[Psychobilly]

Very nicely done Ant... A great result

I use Bridge to automate the processing of the indvidual files that make up an anim if it needs tweaking... generate an action in CS and the run it on all the files using Bridge... I normally do a test run by taking every 20th frame or so especially if there are any levels tweaks in the action...

Peter...

[Beyond_Vision]

A great animation Ant it looks like you had a spectacular show.

Regards

Kevin

[daveg]

Excellent Ant shows great patience in both aquiring and processing that lot. I've noticed in my own anims how the NLCs always move in the opposite direction to lower altitude clouds - Proves their high altitude i suppose.

Dave Gradwell

[Ant]

Cheers guys, your comments are always appreciated

In my very limited experience, it was a good show.

About half way through the sequence I up the exposure to 1.3s then 1.6s and the last section is 2 seconds per image.

The anmation was created in Image Ready - but ther must be a way of compressing the file more that I have. 6mb is still quite large for the internet.

Peter, I did use an action to automate the cropping and resizing of each frame, this I did in PS by creating an "action". The time spent on this includes working out how to create an action then finding the automate button...

Easy when you know how

Thanks again

Ant

[daveg]

Ant Heres what I do and normally runs about 1 meg.

Save original images as tiffs.

Process the tiffs - levels curves etc

reduce image size to about 640x427

save as gif w/ settings of pallette - local perceptual; colors 256; forced black & white; transparancy - unticked; dither difusion; amount 100%; preserve exact colours - ticked; row order - normal.

I then use a freeware package called unfreez (www.whitsoftdev.com) and literally drag and drop into the unfreez window.

tick loop animation and frame delay as you wish.

I know the old version of PSP had animation shop w/ it but PSP X does not!!

Hope this helps

Dave

[Ant]

Cheers Dave, I'll download that software.

I'm off to check out your thread now with the animations...

Cheers

Ant