Chile Forum

Time lapse: old rocks and old skies

Stéphane Guisard — a photographer whose work has graced this blog many times — has created a beautiful time lapse video of the night sky, shot in the Atacama desert in Chile. The site has petroglyphs — ancient drawings carved into the rock — that Stéphane used as a foreground to the dance going on in the night sky. Watch!

[Make sure it's HD and make it full screen. He has it posted to YouTube as well, but the resolution is not as high.]

I love how this opens, with the bright star Betelgeuse hanging over the rocks, quickly joined by the Orion Nebula — seen upside-down to northern hemisphere sensibilities. Look at the bottom right star of Orion’s belt once it clears the rock (around 28 seconds in): that fuzziness around it is real, home to the Horsehead Nebula.

At 1:04 the Small Magellanic Cloud — a galactic satellite companion to the Milky Way — makes an appearance, and if I don’t miss my guess, the bright "star" right next to it is 47 Tuc, one of the biggest globular clusters in the sky. The Andromeda Galaxy and Jupiter show up at 1:40, and the Pleiades make a cameo a little after two minutes in… and the ending is pretty cool, too.

I’ve never been to Chile, but videos like this make me want to go very much. Because of happenstance — the tilt of the Earth and the geometric relationship to the rest of the Milky Way galaxy — the southern skies are better than what we get up here. A moonless night that far from city lights would be quite the trip, and very much worth it.

Astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard, renown for his images and time-lapse videos of the night sky, last month released a spectacular video taken in Chile's Atacama Desert.

We've seen some amazing videos of the starry sky, but what we love about this one is that Guisard not only captures some of the constellations and stars visible in the Southern Hemisphere, but also some of the ancient rock engravings, or petroglyphs, in part of the Atacama Desert.

And, not to mention, it's set to Tchaikovsky's classic "Swan Lake."

Phil Plait, also known as the Bad Astronomer, explains in his Discover Magazine blog some of the constellations and stars seen in the video.

Staring at the sky isn't just a hobby for Guisard. According to The World At Night, an organization that promotes celestial photography and videography, Guisard works at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is also located in the Atacama Desert.

According to NASA, the Atacama Desert, which is extremely dry, "is, in microbial terms, the most Mars-like environment on Earth." Earlier this year, however, a NASA satellite captured images of rare winter snowstorm, the largest in the area in about 50 years.