Usually star trails time-lapse photography and panoramic photos do not go together, but this is exactly what photographer Vincent Brady has accomplished with his Planetary Panoramas – 360 Degree Night-Sky Time-Lapse.
In his setup, he uses a custom rig of 4 cameras with fisheye lenses. Travelling to “firefly parties in Missouri, dark eerie nights at Devils Tower, through Logan Pass at Glacier National Park, up the mountains of British Columbia, and around the amazing arches and sandstone monuments in the Great American Southwest,” he spends the daytime to scout out the best locations and times to shoot, and returns at night when the sky is clear.
Each camera is set up to take continuous shots, typically over 2-3 hours with 1-2 minute exposures, resulting in 100 or 200 photos from each camera. All the images from a camera are then stacked using StarSltax. The 4 stacked images are then manually — and tediously — stitched into a panorama using PTGui Pro. Finally, the stitched panorama is tweaked in Photoshop.
via Colossal