First clear and mostly aurora-free night of the season. I managed to catch a fairly clear star trail.

This has been taken with a Ricoh Theta X camera, remote-controlled to take one long-exposure shot every 30 seconds - something it can't natively do.

It's not perfect: the camera regularly loses connection to the Wifi from the beach, so there's a lot of holes in the trails. And there's noticeable distortion at the seams because the stitcher is having a hard time figuring out how to stitch together two mostly dark images without any references. You'd think it should do well with easy-to-match star patterns, but it usually needs a lot more context than that.

The Ricoh Theta X just isn't a night-time camera. I'm still trying to improve it: I'm currently waiting for a special cable to arrive in the mail to connected it to ethernet and charge it at the same time, so the trails are uninterrupted. And I might take raw images and stitch them myself if I ever figure out the Hugin parameters for the lenses. Also, I think there might a way to lock the stitcher's parameters in the web API, so I have to check that out.

But until then, that's what I got last night 🙂