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This is a tutorial explaining how to make a motion time-lapse of the the Milky Way galaxy as the earth moves beneath it as seen in the following video.

To achieve this effect, I used a Ronin-SC Gimbal with a Fujifilm X-T3 mirrorless camera. I haven’t tried other gimbals, but if you have on that has a motion time-lapse function, that will work as well.

How to Capture the Motion Time-lapse

Next is a video explaining Part 1. How to capture the time-lapse. Watch it if you prefer a video explanation, otherwise keep reading below for a written, step-by-step explanation.

Camera Settings

• By exposing for as long as possible you can reduce your reliance on ISO to compensate.

• With a wide lens, you should be able to expose for anywhere from 10-20 seconds

• If you see oblong stars or star trails, you need to reduce the exposure time. All the stars should be pinpoints of light.

ISO

Keep this as low as possible

• ISO is your sensor’s sensitivity to light. You can raise the ISO to brighten your image, but it comes at a cost.

• The higher your ISO, the more likely you are to see sensor noise in your images. That is the speckled grain in dark photos. Noisy astrophotography photos are bad for several reasons:

  • There is a lot of smooth, black space in astrophotos. These areas will make noise more noticeable than usual.

  • These photos will have a lot of tiny white dots (a.k.a. stars) that can be hard to distinguish from ISO noise. If you try to clean up the grain, you’ll likely lose some stars along with it.

• Increase the ISO to the point where you have a good looking photo and stop. If it’s a touch on the dark side, that’s okay because it is possible to get more details in post processing.

• For a Fujifilm X-T3/X-T4 I generally shoot between ISO 3200-6400. Different cameras will likely have a slightly different range. Generally older or less expensive cameras have more ISO noise which will require you to stay even lower.

How to Edit the Motion Time-lapse

This section covers how to edit a the time-lapse, though it also has advice on editing pictures of the Milky Way in general because essentially that’s what we’re doing. Editing a picture, copying the edits to all the other photos and then turning them into a video.

Here is the video showing how to do these steps. Read on below for a written description of the process.

In this process we’re going to use Adobe Products, specifically Lightroom, Premiere Pro, and After Effects, though you can substitute your favorite photo and video editors and achieve the same results.

You can skip the photo editing part if you don’t have Lightroom or don’t want to use it. You can achieve decent results if you do all of your editing in your NLE (Non-linear Editor; aka your video program), but by editing the photos in a photo editor first, you’ll be able to use the RAW files to pull out the most detail that the NLE doesn’t have the ability to access.

Photo Editing

Import the sequence of photos into a Lightroom Catalog

Import all of your photos into a Lightroom catalog. I ended up having 470 photos. Take a look at the first, middle, and last pictures. If it’s anything like mine, you might see some color or exposure differences between the 3 spots. Because of this, I decided to edit the middle image. It had a bit of the cattle lot in my first image and some of the orange horizon in my last image as well as a very good shot of the Milky Way where I could focus on it.