Here Comes The Sun

Harrison

Chorus

Little darling
It's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been here

Chorus

Little darling
The smiles returning to the faces
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been here

Chorus

Bridge

Little darling
I see the ice is slowly melting
Little darling
It seems like years since it's been clear

Chorus

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Last night I had my Math 221 exam, and had planned on watching a movie after I got back to give me a chance to unwind. The person I was going to watch the movie with was busy, so we decided to delay the screening until tonight, and I climbed into bed early (around 11:00). I decided I would get up early this morning to try out a little experiment. Getting up at 5:30 in the morning, I went through my standard routine, then got my camera set up to do some time lapse photography of the Sun rising in the South-East. I set up my tripod in front of my window facing the approximate direction that I have noted the Sun coming up over the past couple days, and made sure my battery was charged and my flash memory empty. Starting at around 6:45 this morning, I pressed the shutter button on my camera every 10 seconds until the Sun rose. A website on the Internet said the Sun would rise at 8:02 this morning, but due to local terrain and buildings, the Sun didn't show its merry face until around 8:27. My intention was to start when it was still pitch dark outside, but the sky started to lighten sooner than I thought it would, so I kind of missed my starting time. All the pictures were taken on my Nikon CoolPix 5900, with the autofocus light assist turned on, though I should've turned it off to make my life easier, as the light was bouncing off my window (and, after reviewing the pictures, was probably throwing the focus off). I also clocked the resolution down to 3 megapixels (2048x1536) and medium JPEG compression. Wite balance, matrix metering, colour, contrast, image sharpening, iso sensitivity, and saturation control were all either default or auto. I turned the focus area and noise reduction off, as I knew that dark shots would have a lot of natural grain and such. The battery held up quite well, taking 611 pictures over a period of 1 hour and 45 minutes, with the lcd monitor on the whole time. I then took all the pictures, put them on my computer, and used MPlayer/MEncoder to encode a DivX video with resolution 1024x768 at 15 frames per second. The specific command line code, for the curious:
mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf w=2048:h=1536:type=jpg:fps=15 -vf scale=1024:768 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=2400 -oac copy -o sunrise_small.avi
I haven't been able to encode a full resolution 2048x1536 video, as the codec seems to give a Segmentation Fault at that resolution (I don't blame it), and I can't get other codecs to handle it either. The video turned out quite small, due to very little apparent motion, at only 12.4MB. You can grab it here.

In the beginning of the video, you can see Venus high and to the center. Around the 4 second mark, Mercury appears behind the bright tower in behind the trees on the left. Because I had to depress the shutter by hand and the lighting conditions were so low, some of the frames came out blurry, despite using a tripod. There were also times when I would shift my arm or press a button too hard and would move the camera, causing the wobble and shifts that happen sporadically. Around the 20 second mark, small black dots appear in individual frames that look like dirt on a traditional film strip, these are actually birds waking up at around 7:30 in the morning and flying in front of the camera. There was one cool point around 7:45 where a plane flew overhead, and the whole belly and wings of the aircraft was reflecting the Sun. I checked for this frame, but the aircraft is too small in the picture to be noteworthy. The Sun finally peeks around Promontory Estates at around 8:27, and the last frame of the video was taken at 8:30.

My method for timing was basically to count to myself (I don't have any lit clocks that show seconds, and my computer monitor would cause too many reflections on the window), so the video isn't very accurate in any sense of the term. The ultimate system would be to have some sort of computer controlled remote shutter switch, so I can write a script or use a program to fire the shutter at exact time intervals without any risk. An AC adapter would also be nice, for those extended time lapse sessions (I figure my battery had about 15 minutes of juice left before it would have quit).