Take a break and appreciate the beauty of the night sky in Mauna Kea Heavens, a time-lapse by astronomer Sean Goebel.
Astronomer and photographer Sean Goebel‘s incredible Mauna Kea Heavens is one of the best astronomy time-lapse videos we’ve seen. The film embodies the spirit of discovery, featuring amazing visuals of telescopes tracking distant objects to the beautiful soundtrack of God is an Astronaut’s “All is violent, all is bright.”
“Timelapse of the observatories atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii. The summit is at an altitude of nearly 14,000 ft and is the premiere site for astronomy in the Northern Hemisphere. As an astronomy graduate student at the University of Hawaii, I’ve enjoyed excellent access to the facility.
This montage was filmed on three nights in April (I was observing on one of the telescopes and would walk outside when things got boring) and four nights during summer 2013.”
If you’re wondering about the yellow lasers, Sean explains: “The technology is called adaptive optics, and the lasers are used to correct for turbulence in the atmosphere.” From what we understand, the lasers are part of a pseudo image stabilisation system, allowing the astronomers to get sharper images – in this case, instead of the camera shaking, the subject is shaking due to the optical distortion of the atmosphere, which the laser detects and corrects for.
View more of Sean’s beautiful stills on his Flickr photostream.
