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The Confusing Majesty of a Night Sky

Saying this vantage point doesn't really make sense assumes that any image of the solar system is comprehensible.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm having trouble mentally reverse-engineering this video—projecting a double star-spiral back to the typical dome of sky—but I'm also pretty sure that doesn't matter.

Just as Mercator projection maps distort to make Greenland huge, flattening a 360-degree time-lapse footage of the night sky causes those weird double vortexes. The whole thing is so utterly mellow though, that, like I said, it's sort of hard to care. As often happens with pictures of the solar system, I'm content to know that it's real without being able to comprehend it.

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Part of the video's appeal is obviously the John Fahey-meets-Nick Drake soundtrack provided by Brandon McCoy, but the visuals are the product of the patient Michigan photographer Vincent Brady.

The Brady Quad Rig. Image: Vincent Brady. Used with permission.

Brady's video is an alchemy made of four outward-looking fisheye lenses, and three hours of minute-long exposures, riding the Earth's 1,040 miles per hour spin, and then a running them through a series of softwares: each camera's series of 100 pictures goes into Starstax, creating four different star-trail images, that are then panoram'd together on “PTGui Pro.”

According to Brady's website, “This is probably the most tedious part but very necessary…Between the fisheye distortion and stars needing to be aligned this usually takes me several hours.” Then they're Photoshopped.

I shot Brady an email to ask him how many months and miles this video had taken him to make—as it seems to span the American West, a region whose breadth is challenged only by that of “American Pie"—even if the results are more like "Vincent."

Image: Vincent Brady. Used with permission.

He told me that the shooting began in May 2013, while the editing took up “a good chunk of March, April, and early May, this year.” Apparently those control points are a real bastard to put in.

“I did originally shoot with the intention of making still images, but always had the idea of making a full time-lapse like this,” Brady told me in an email:

It involves finding locations, shooting at night, and several hours editing one photo. I didn't seem to dedicate much time for the video. After I had about a years worth of work I decided it was time to go back and rethink the video as I had learned a lot, and had completed my first time-lapse 'The Firefly Time-Lapse.' It's a little crazy because I would spend about a full day batch creating panoramas and editing them, and get about a 12 second clip for each scene. So yeah, I dedicated a lot of afternoons in the Red Rock Bakery in Moab, UT to editing the video while I was shooting at night around the area.

The video spins through Devil's Tower and dabbles with that tiny planet effect in a totally justified way. Photography so often gets stuck simply emulating what our eyes already show us; but glasses-wearers can't recreate four eyes open for minutes at a time.