Keck Observatory operates two ten-meter telescopes atop the summit of Mauna Kea Hawai’i. Keeping those telescopes on-sky every night is the summit crew of the Operations Department. This video is dedicated to the guys of the Keck daycrew who make it possible.

The video is a combination of two techniques. Many scenes were filmed as standard video then accelerated during editing to allow the motion to become clear. Examples of this are scenes of telescopes slewing and the interferometer delay lines moving.

Slower subjects, such as clouds or the stars moving across the sky, were photographed as time lapse. Here a large number of still images were taken. These are then processed and converted to video using Photoshop CS5 before loading into the video editing software, Adobe Premiere Elements. To construct the time lapse sequences sometimes required thousands of separate images, quickly filling memory cards and exhausting batteries. After dark it is long exposure time lapse that is used, with individual exposures often 15 seconds to one minute long.

Many of the nighttime scenes are lit by moonlight, this allowed good exposures while still capturing the telescopes with stars overhead. A moonlit exposure of 30 to 60seconds can often appear as if taken during the day, with the odd effect of having stars in a blue sky.

A number of cameras were used in capturing the imagery… A Canon G11, Canon 20Da, Canon 40D, Canon 60D and Canon 5D MkII were used for various scenes. This often involved cameras setup on tripods while programmed to take exposures for hours at a time.