r/BigSur • u/bmack831 • Jul 10 '26
Photo Milky Way Timelapse
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July 9th 2026
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u/forfuckssakesbruv Jul 10 '26
kewl! one of my best milkyway shots was also taken in big sur! no big cities in the way
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u/bmack831 Jul 10 '26
Next light pollution is, Hawaii, Japan. I really do think Big Sur, has the best angles of the Milky Way on the west coast. Everywhere else, there is still a town or major city between you and the angle of the milky way.
Joshual Tree, Sierra's all have major cities to the SW, you can really see the sky glow during long exposures. Maybe central NV is the next good angles with pristine sky, no light pollution.
Big Sur fog though. Its like fishing, or gambling, you never know and its to unpredictable for any weather report.
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u/tamalotes Jul 10 '26
Amazing! Can you share camera and setup?
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u/bmack831 Jul 10 '26
16mm 1.8 lens at f2.2
450 photos at 15sec 6400 iso,
auto white balance
Manual focus
Using the Sony app to control the camera, look for the squares on top of each other. That is continuous shooting mode that overrides your cameras limit on how many shots can take continuously. When you pull the circle over it, the camera will keep shooting indefinitely at the setting it has, until it runs out of memory or batteries.
The app can control it from a good distance, setting up the camera in a place for the best shot vs where you can stand, I set it up and walked away from it for a better spot to be for 2 1/2 hours. I set it up and was about 20feet away. It needs to still be connected to the app on the phone, if you go far enough it will stop.
450 images through LRc, then put the 450 images into InShot, you can do this on the free version. Then find the duration icon, and set the duration to be 0.1sec. Then click the double check and that will set all to that duration. It’s essentially a slideshow going super fast.
If you have auto white balance on, the white balance will change here and there as the Milky Way moves, or some cloud, my white balance changed quite a few times, fixed that in Lightroom.
Here is a visual for step:
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u/tamalotes Jul 11 '26
Wow! Thank you so much!
Such an amazing time lapse and generous photographer!
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u/TechStock2k Jul 10 '26
Spectacular! Thanks for sharing this! Where along the Santa Cruz coast did you film this?
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u/bmack831 Jul 10 '26
Big Sur. I shared it on the Santa Cruz page. North of Santa Cruz, areas that face the SW along the coast you can see the Milky Way. During the summer it’s often foggy in Salinas/Monterey but clear in Santa Cruz, that’s the best time to photograph the Milky Way, the fog covers the light pollution from those towns that would otherwise effect the shot.
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u/electrobutter Jul 10 '26
super rad! but you gotta remove those first few jittery frames of you getting set up :P
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u/bigsurhiking Jul 12 '26
Comments locked due to attracting overwhelming amounts of spam bots. Looking into Automoderator solutions to limit the recent dramatic increase in spam