A timelapse of solar arrays reflecting aurora and city lights as they align themselves.

A timelapse of solar arrays reflecting aurora and city lights as they align themselves for the impending sunrise.

The solar array light reflections were so mind blowing that I stayed up till 1AM to shoot a few more sunrises. Luckily we get sunrises every 90 minutes.

One of the techniques I have learned over the past few months to get great still photos is to setup lots of timelapses to find great lighting. With a timelapse the camera takes a RAW photo on a time interval that is typically every 0.5s and saves the image. Our camera has an option to automatically create a video from the sequence of images. We then watch the video afterwards to find what part of the of the orbit amongst thousands of individual images has the best lighting or subject matter to either go back later to the same part of an orbit and take a still image or pull the still image saved from the timelapse process.

Yesterday the moon was not up during the night portions of our orbits so I knew I had a shot at getting the Milky Way core and some aurora. The timelapse was setup in a module we call МИМ2. It has a great view of the service module solar arrays. There are were so many great still shots in the timelapse series but the ”dance” the solar arrays do reflecting aurora and city lights is so cool to see with a timelapse video. A still image does not fully capture it.

1.6s, 15mm, T1.8, ISO 6400, 2s intervals. Exposure and a few items adjusted on a few hundred individual frames simultaneously before making a 15fps timelapse.