Planetary Panoramas: Vincent Brady's 360-Degree Night-Sky Time-Lapse

Vincent Brady's Planetary Panoramas, released on 17 June 2014, wraps the whole night sky around a tiny spinning world. The four-minute film stitches the views of four fisheye cameras into 360-degree time-lapses, so stars wheel in two directions at once and rock arches seem to reach out of the screen. The internet nicknamed it the "toroidal sky", and the method behind it is as interesting as the result.

How Vincent Brady built a four-camera rig

The idea came in 2012. Brady was shooting 360-degree panoramas in daylight and long exposures of star trails at night, and he told PetaPixel that "it suddenly became clear that the potential to combine the two techniques could be a trip!"

By January 2013 he had finished a custom cross-shaped mount that holds four DSLR cameras, each fitted with a fisheye lens. Together they cover every direction at once. All four cameras shoot continuous exposures of one to two minutes, and each scene ends when the batteries run out, usually after two to three hours.

From thousands of exposures to a little planet

The processing took far longer than the shooting. Brady blended the frames in StarStax with a Photoshop script, then stitched the four views by hand in PTGui Pro, setting 30 to 40 control points for each alignment. Final adjustments went through Photoshop, LR Time-Lapse and Premiere Pro, with Magic Lantern firmware on the cameras. Because each frame represents a minute or more of sky, the motion has a slightly stuttered, hypnotic rhythm.

Astronomer Phil Plait explained the look in his Bad Astronomy column. A stitched 360-degree image can be mapped onto many shapes, just as a globe can be flattened into a Mercator map. In the "little planet" version the flat horizon is rolled into a circle so its left edge meets the right. The ground becomes a small asteroid with the sky wrapped around it, and tall objects such as arches and hoodoos stretch towards the viewer.

Why the stars turn in two directions

As Earth rotates, the sky appears to turn around the celestial poles. Facing north, stars circle counterclockwise around Polaris; facing south, they turn the other way; to the east they rise straight up and to the west they sink straight down. A normal camera sees one of these patterns. Brady's rig sees all of them in a single frame, so the film shows small circles spinning around the North Star while the southern sky swirls in the opposite sense.

Some sequences use a flat horizon facing east, south or west, which makes the stars appear to rise from the middle of the frame. Others show the entire sky overhead in an all-sky view, the opposite of the little-planet effect.

Locations and music

The scenes were filmed across North America:

• the sandstone arches of Utah and Monument Valley
• Glacier National Park in Montana
• the Ozarks
• British Columbia
• South Dakota
• Michigan

The soundtrack is "One Letter From Lady", an acoustic fingerpicking piece by Brandon McCoy, a longtime friend of Brady's from the Lansing area. Brady later released a remastered 4K version and sells prints of the panoramas. For a closer look at his daytime work, see Brady’s panoramic camera approach, and for a related idea, the imagined dark skies over cities.

Related reading

• The Mountain: Seven Days of Sky Photography at Teide
• Sun Halos over Finland: Understanding Pauli Hänninen’s Photographs
• Thierry Cohen’s Darkened Cities: Imagining Urban Skies Without Light Pollution
• Mike Taylor’s Maine Aurora Photography and a Change of Direction

Sources

• Planetary Panoramas - 360 Degree Night-Sky Time-Lapse by Vincent Brady, Music by Brandon McCoy (YouTube)
• PetaPixel: Night sky time-lapse captures trippy star trails in 360 degrees
• Phil Plait, Bad Astronomy: Time-lapse: Planetary Panoramas
• Photograph and video: Vincent Brady