I had a site at Pawnee Campground at Brainard Lake Recreation area for almost two weeks this July. I’ve spent time their ever year, and have taken a number of long exposure night sky shots, but wanted to try and catch the Milky Way this year.
I setup my Insta360 X3, connecting it to a separate battery pack (my SUP inflator) to ensure the camera would run all night.
On the first clear night at the site, I used the X3’s Starlapse setting on Auto. It was an utter fail. The camera took 1/30 sec exposure images all night long. The exposure time was too short, so all the images and the resultant timelapse were just solid black. Sigh. The X3 also doesn’t turn off the screen on the camera, so it was visible light throughout the whole night. In the future I might rig up something to cover the back of the camera, but for now I just made sure to position it so it didn’t face any other campsites and was only visible to me.
The nights following my first attempt were cloudy. A few nights I setup the camera only to put it back away before crawling into bed because of clouds or impending rain.
One night, the sky appeared clear as evening approached. I set things up again and this time it looked like I’d get my chance. Instead of Auto, I tested a few other settings on single long exposure shots, and set the camera to Starlapse Manual mode. I adjusted the exposure to 40sec. I thought I had changed ISO, but for some reason it defaulted to ~3200. In retrospect, that ISO was way too high so the resultant time lapse is a bit noisier than I’d like.
But the capture was a success!
I woke up and stopped the camera about 5am as the sun was coming up, because I knew the 40sec exposures were quickly going to get blown out and I didn’t want to use up anymore of my battery.
I used the Insta360 app to edit the timelapse, refocus the 360 footage to select the pan and zoom, and to add music. I am happy with the end result:
I planned to try again with a lower ISO and longer shutter time, but nights for the rest of the trip all had cloud cover. The camping trip is over now, but I will definitely try again the next time I’m out there. Next time I’ve noted that I want to try an ISO around 800, with 60sec exposures since that seemed to work relatively well on some of my tests.
I might also give it another run with the GoPro Hero 11. With the updated firmware on that camera I can set the timelapse to start much later into the night instead of having to get it running before I head to bed. I’ll just need to be more precise about aiming it since I won’t be able to reframe from 360.
Have you shot night sky timelapses with either of these cameras? Have any suggested settings I should put to the test?
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