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kottke.org posts about time lapse

Time Lapse Visualization of How 10 Satellites Build a Daily Global Precipitation Map

The first 30 seconds of this time lapse video provides a great look into how the 10 satellites that make up the Global Precipitation Measurement Constellation scan the surface of the Earth to provide daily global precipitation maps.

This visualization shows the constellation in action, taking precipitation measurements underneath the satellite orbits. As time progresses and the Earth’s surface is covered with measurements, the structure of the Earth’s precipitation becomes clearer, from the constant rainfall patterns along the Equator to the storm fronts in the mid-latitudes. The dynamic nature of the precipitation is revealed as time speeds up and the satellite data swaths merge into a continuous visualization of changing rain and snowfall.


10-Year Time Lapse of US Weather Radar

Sometimes I load up the US map on Weather Underground just to watch storm systems tumbling and swirling across the country, so this 2-hour time lapse of the last 10 years of US weather radar is riiiiight up my alley. You don’t have to watch the whole thing β€” even dipping in here and there for a couple of minutes is really gratifying. Can you get ASMR from a weather map? (thx, benjamin)


The Earth Rotating Beneath a Stationary Milky Way

In most time lapse videos you see of the night sky, the stars wheel through the sky as the heavens revolve around the Earth. But that perspective is really only valid from our particular frame of reference standing on the Earth. What’s actually happening is that our tiny little speck of dirt is twirling amid a galactic tapestry that is nearly stationary. And in the video above, you see just that…the Earth rotating as the camera lens stays locked on a motionless Milky Way. Total mindjob.

See also the fisheye views of the Earth rotating about the stabilized sky in this video.

Update: Another time lapse of the Earth rotating underneath the stars:


The Motorbikes of Taiwan

From Hiroshi Kondo, a mesmerizing short film called Multiverse of the motorbike-jammed streets of Taiwan. Right around the 50 second mark, Kondo starts to use a clever time lapse technique to highlight individuality within the bustling mass of traffic. It’s a really cool effect and reminded me of this clip art animation by Oliver Laric. (via colossal)


Here Grows New York City, a Time Lapse of NYC’s Street Grid from 1609 to the Present

Using geological surveys, geo-referenced road network data, and historic maps drawn the from the collections of the Library of Congress and New York Public Library, Miles Zhang made this time lapse video of the development of the street grid of NYC from 1609 (when Henry Hudson first explored the area for the Dutch) to the present day.

The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up area at intervals of every 20-30 years in the city’s history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.

Zhang has written up his research methodology for the video as well as some observations and analysis of the data.

For almost the first half of Manhattan’s history, walking was the primary means of transport. This preference was manifested in the shorter distances between residential, industrial, shipping, and commercial areas β€” and more frequently their overlap. With street systems, the reliance on the foot is manifested in narrower streets widths not designed to accommodate greater width from carriages, trolleys, and later cars. In fact, the average width of secondary arterial streets increased from 30 feet for streets opened between 1624-1664, to 45 feet for streets opened 1664-1811, and then a uniform width of 60 feet for any cross street opened after 1811. Later widenings increased many of these smaller and pre-1811 streets to width between 100 and 130 feet. In other words, moving from the older networks in the south to newer networks in the north, the width of streets and size of blocks generally increases. These new widths might be influenced by growing population size from only 25,000 in the 1770s, to 64,000 by 1811, and 247,000 by 1834, thereby requiring wider streets for expanding population and higher buildings.

These gradual changes in planning reflected increasing reliance on carriages and horse-drawn trolleys instead of walking. Each mode of transport required a different minimum street width and was associated with different speeds.

(via @john_overholt)


A Timelapse of the Entire Universe

John Boswell has made a 10-minute time lapse video showing the history of the universe, from its formation 13.8 billion years ago up to the present. Each second of the video represents the passing of 22 million years. But don’t blink right near the end…you might miss the tiny fraction of a second that represents the entire history of humanity.

See also: Boswell’s Timelapse of the Future, a dramatized time lapse of possible events from now until the heat death of the universe many trillion trillion trillions of years from now.


Timelapse of the Future

One of my favorite Wikipedia articles is the timeline of the far future, which details the predictions science makes about the possible futures of the Earth, solar system, galaxy, and universe, from Antares exploding in a supernova visible from Earth in broad daylight in 10,000 years to the end of star formation in galaxies 1 trillion years from now…and beyond.

In his new video, Timelapse of the Future, John Boswell takes us on a trip through that timeline, a journey to the end of time.

We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos β€” to name a few.

A regular time lapse of that voyage would take forever, so Boswell cleverly doubles the pace every 5 seconds, so that just after 4 minutes into the video, a trillion years passes in just a second or two.1 You’d think that after the Earth is devoured by the Sun about 3 minutes in, things would get a bit boring and you could stop watching, but then you’d miss zombie white dwarfs roaming the universe in the degenerate era, the black hole mergers era 1000 trillion trillion trillion trillion years from now, the possible creation of baby “life boat” universes, and the point at which “nothing happens and it keeps not happening forever”.

  1. This is similar to Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten increasing its speed and field of view every 10 seconds.↩


Watch a Single Cell Become a Complex Organism in Just Six Minutes

In this time lapse filmed by Jan van IJken, the embryo of a salamander is shown transforming into a hatched tadpole, from a single cell to a complex organism in a three-week process that’s condensed into just six minutes of video.

The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal’s life. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream.


Peculiar Pyongyang, a 4K Time Lapse Video of the North Korean Capital

Time lapse video tours of big cities are a common sight on YouTube β€” see this Dubai hyperlapse or this Paris time lapse β€” and the technique has become an aesthetic of its own. But seeing the super-stylized & ultra-HD practice applied to a place like Pyongyang, North Korea broke my brain a little bit. The video was shot by Joerg Daiber, who writes of the experience:

Pyongyang is by far the weirdest and strangest place I have ever been to. At the same time it’s also one of the the most interesting and intriguing places and unlike anywere else I have ever been to. You go there with 100 questions and you return with 1000!

(via @kbandersen)


A Year in Weather

This is mesmerizing to watch for a few minutes: a time lapse map of weather activity across the entire US in 2018. I was thinking it would be instructive to see this sped up a bit more, that perhaps different patterns might reveal themselves, and then I remembered that you can control the playback speed on YouTube videos…just click the gear icon. I think I like the 2X version better. (via @DesignObserver)


Time Lapse of the Sushi Scene in Isle of Dogs

My favorite scene in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs is the sushi-making scene. It’s a pure showcase of stop motion animation goodness and wordless storytelling.

Andy Biddle has posted a behind-the-scenes time lapse video of him and Anthony Farquhar-Smith animating that scene:

From the costume changes, it looks like that 40 seconds of video took about 29 days to complete, although obviously not full days in many cases.

You can see more of Biddle’s work here and Farquhar-Smith’s work here.

Update: Somehow I totally missed the days counter in the upper left corner of the video…the sequence took 32 days to do. (This is like the awareness test with the moonwalking bear.) (thx, all)

Update: Isle of Dogs’ head puppet master explains a bit more about what goes into making these stop motion scenes.


ISS Time Lapse Video of Two Complete Trips Around the World

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first module of the International Space Station being put into orbit, ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst shot a 15-minute time lapse video of the Earth from the ISS, long enough for two complete orbits of the planet. Landmarks along the journey are annotated right on the video and the location of the ISS is also plotted on a map in the top right corner. Love the nighttime thunderstorms over the Pacific.

See also An Incredible Video of What It’s Like to Orbit the Earth for 90 Minutes.


Monsoon V

Mike Olbinski is back with another of his jawdropping storm chasing videos. I find clouds endlessly fascinating β€” it seems like there’s always something new to consider while watching these kinds of videos. This time around, I noticed how the clouds in several instances actually “opened up” when it started to rain, like a hatch that finally succumbed to the pressure of all that water pushing down on it. (Check out 1:38 for a particularly clear instance.)


Time Lapse of a SpaceX Launch Looks Like a UFO

Sunday night, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The nighttime launch created what looked like a nebula in the sky, prompting LA mayor Eric Garcetti to tweet that his city was not being visited by a flying saucer. This 4K time lapse of the launch is only 13 seconds long and is worth watching about 40 times in a row.


A 20-year time lapse of stars orbiting a massive black hole

The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile has been watching the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy and the stars that orbit it. Using observations from the past 20 years, the ESO made this time lapse video of the stars orbiting the black hole, which has the mass of four million suns. I’ve watched this video like 20 times today, my mind blown at being able to observe the motion of these massive objects from such a distance.

The VLT was also able to track the motion of one of these stars and confirm for the first time a prediction made by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

New infrared observations from the exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY, SINFONI and NACO instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have now allowed astronomers to follow one of these stars, called S2, as it passed very close to the black hole during May 2018. At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometres from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometres per hour β€” almost three percent of the speed of light.

S2 has the mass of about 15 suns. That’s 6.6 Γ— 10^31 pounds moving at 3% of the speed of light. Wowowow.


Cross-section time lapse of a kidney bean growing into a plant

It’s fun to watch this kidney bean grow into a plant over the course of 25 days to the strains of The Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss. Thanks to this cross-sectional view, you can see the main root push down into the soil and the tendrils branching out to anchor the plant for its remarkable vertical growth to come.


A timeline map of the 200,000 year history of human civilization

This animation shows how humans have spread and organized themselves across the Earth over the past 200,000 years. The time lapse starts with the migration of homo sapiens out of sub-Saharan Africa 200,000 years ago, with a few thousand years passing every second. As the agricultural revolution gets underway and the pace of civilization quickens, the animation slows down to hundreds of years per second and eventually, as it nears modern times, 1-2 years per second.

See also time lapse animations of the history of Europe from the fall of Rome to modern times and human population through time. (via open culture)


A time lapse video where you can actually see the Crab Nebula expanding

The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova that happened 6,500 light years away from Earth. From our perspective, the supernova happened almost 1000 years ago, in July, 1054. Using a home-built telescope, amateur astronomer Detlef Hartmann took a photos of the Crab Nebula over a ten-year period and assembled them into a time lapse video of the nebula’s expansion. Even after a millennia and across all that distance, the expansion of the nebula is clearly visible. And why not, those gases are moving at a clip of 1400 kilometers per second (more than 3 million miles per hour or 0.5% the speed of light).

As Phil Plait notes, we’re used to seeing things in our solar system move in the skies, but far-away bodies? That’s just weeeeeird.

Sure, the Moon moves in the sky, and the planets around the Sun, but deep sky objects β€” stars, nebulae, galaxies β€” are so distant that any physical motion at all is incredibly difficult to detect. They may as well be frozen in time. Being able to see it… that’s astonishing.

Hartmann’s is not the first Crab Nebula animation; I also found animations using images from 2002 & 2012, 1973 & 2001, 1999 & 2012, and 1950 & 2000. Someone with an interest in astronomy and photo/video editing should put all these views together into one 68-year time lapse of the nebula’s expansion.


The astounding growth of China’s subway system, 1990-2020

In 1990, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan had only a handful of subway lines. In the early 2000s, growth in the number of cities with subways started to increase dramatically, as did the number of lines in the bigger cities like Beijing and Shanghai. As of 2020, more than 40 Chinese cities will have subway systems. Check out this time lapse map by “transit nerd” Peter Dovak (who also did these Mini Metros maps):

In this time, Beijing and Shanghai in particular have ballooned from nearly nothing into the world’s two largest, in both length and annual ridership. The timeline of their expansion alone is mesmerizing.

Meanwhile, the NYC subway system is…


Time lapse video of a man building a log cabin from scratch

Over the course of several month, Shawn James built a log cabin all by himself in the wilderness of Canada.

Once on site, I spent a month reassembling the cabin on a foundation of sand and gravel. Once the log walls were up, I again used hand tools to shape every log, board and timber to erect the gable ends, the wood roof, the porch, the outhouse and a seemingly endless number of woodworking projects.

For the roof, I used an ancient primitive technology to waterproof and preserve the wood - shou sugi ban, a fire hardening wood preservation technique unique to Japan and other areas in northern climates.

See also the Primitive Technology guy, who recently bought a new property and is starting from scratch building on it.


Time… Lapsed: An Excerpt from Noticing #2, January 12, 2018

The second edition of Noticing, a still-new and all-free kottke.org newsletter, went out this afternoon. Here’s a short excerpt of the third and fourth sections, “Time… Lapsed” and “Ask Dr. Time.” We hope you’ll subscribe.

Time… Lapsed

This was a good week for historical snapshots. I was fascinated by Cinefix’s list of the top movie remakes of all time, including maybe especially Michael Mann’s Heat, which (I didn’t know) is a remake of a failed TV pilot Mann produced in 1989. The deep dive into Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu is also great. But all of the featured films, whether remakes, sequels, or adaptations, show the effects of time and choice, and wow, yeah, I am deep into those two things lately. Like, without getting completely junior year of college on it–the metaphysical context for being, and the active, existential fact of being itself.

Consider Alan Taylor’s as-always-gorgeous photo remembrance of 1968, one of the most tumultuous years in world and American history. (There are going to be a lot of 50th anniversaries of things I am not ready for there to be 50th anniversaries for.) Or acts of misremembrance and mistaken choices, like how late 1990s and early 2000s nostalgia for World War 2 (and a commensurate forgetting of Vietnam and the Cold War) helped turn September 11, 2001 into a new kind of permanent war that shows no signs of ending.

Or for lighter fare, see this photo of the cast of The Crown with their real-life counterparts, or try out Permanent Redirect, digital art that moves to a new URL whenever someone views it. Watch an English five-pound note be reconstructed from shredded waste, or see this film of time-lapse thunderstorms and tornadoes in 8K high-definition. (That last one is pretty scary, actually. But beautiful.)

Ask Dr. Time

Speaking of time–you may have missed the introduction of Dr. Time, the world’s first metaphysical advice columnist, last Friday. Last week we looked at the changing relationship between orality and literacy (or, I should probably say, oralities and literacies) from prehistory through digital technology. I don’t have anything quite so sweeping for this week; only this round-up of longevity research compiled by Laura Deming (which I mostly understand), and this exciting new scientific paper on reversing the thermodynamic arrow of time using quantum correlations (which I barely understand).Β 

So, this week, my advice regarding time would be (in this order):

  1. Try to restrict your caloric intake;
  2. Consider shifting some of your qubits into spin 1/2;
  3. Accept that we’re thrown into our circumstances, regardless of how shitty they may be, and greet whatever fate rises to meet you with resolute defiance.

Amazing black & white storm time lapse in 8K

Storm-chasing photographer Mike Olbinski is back with a new time lapse video and this one is in black & white and was shot in 8K resolution. (BTW, 8K is 7680Γ—4320 or 4320p. That’s a lot of K!)

Breathe is made up solely of storm clips from 2017…either from the spring across the central plains or from the monsoon here in the southwest. Some are favorites, some are just ones I knew would be amazing in monochrome and others I used because they fit the music so well.

The video was unavailable in 8K to me on both YouTube and Vimeo β€” maybe you need to be a paying member? β€” but even at 4K, this thing is hypnotically stunning. I rewound and watched the part starting at 1:39 about five times. You can see more of my posts about Olbinski here. (via colossal)


Time Lapse of an English Five Pound Note Reconstructed From Shredded Production Waste

When the Bank of England misprints banknotes, they shred them into tiny little pieces. In this time lapse video, compressed from an entire work day into 11 minutes, a person with a tweezers attempts to reconstruct a five pound note from those tiny shredded pieces. For reference, here’s what the five pound note actually looks like.


Beautiful 30-day Time Lapse of a Cargo Ship’s Voyage

Jeffrey Tsang is a sailor on a cargo ship. On a recent voyage from the Red Sea to Sri Lanka to Singapore to Hong Kong, he set up a camera facing the bow of the ship to record the month-long journey. From ~80,000 photos taken, he constructed a 10-minute time lapse that somehow manages to be both meditative and informative. You get to see cargo operations at a few different ports, sunrises, thunderstorms, and the clearest night skies you’ve ever seen. Highly recommended viewing. (via colossal)


Time lapse of a Sol LeWitt wall drawing

Wall Drawing 797 is a conceptual artwork by Sol LeWitt consisting of instructions that anyone can use to make a drawing. I found this at The Kid Should See This1 and I cannot improve on their description:

How does one person’s actions influence the next person’s actions in a shared space? Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings explore this intricate visual butterfly effect in the collaborative art entitled Wall Drawing 797, a conceptual piece that can be drawn by following LeWitt’s instructions. (He died in 2007.)

“Intricate visual butterfly effect” is such a good way of putting it. I have a huge wall right above my desk…I kind of want to make my own Wall Drawing 797 now.

  1. You should be reading The Kid Should See This even if you don’t have children. It’s always so good and interesting.↩


The best photos and videos of the 2017 solar eclipse

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

2017 Eclipse Photos

Photo and video credits from the top: Nashville progression photo by Richard Sparkman. HDR photo with Moon detail by Dennis Sprinkle (this one blew my mind a little). Rock climber by Ted Hesser (the story behind the photo). Progression photo by Jasman Lion Mander. Photo from the Alaska Airlines flight by Tanya Harrison. Video of the eclipse shadow moving across the Earth from the NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite. Neon cowboy photo by Rick Armstrong. ISS transit photo and video by Joel Kowsky. Partial eclipse video by NASA’s SDO spacecraft. Partial eclipse video by the ESA’s Proba-2 satellite. Video of the eclipse shadow moving across the US by the NOAA’s GOES-16 weather satellite. Time lapse video from The Salt Lake Tribune. Amazing 4K close-up video by JunHo Oh, ByoungJun Jeong, and YoungSam Choi…check out those prominences!

More eclipse photos on Petapixel (and here), BBC, Bored Panda, The Verge, and the NY Times.

Update: I added the time lapse video from The Salt Lake Tribune. (via the kid should see this)

Update: Added the 4K close-up video.


Beautiful time lapse storm footage from spring 2017

Stormchaser Mike Olbinski is back with his latest time lapse video of clouds and storm footage he shot this spring.

The work on this film began on March 28th and ended June 29th. There were 27 total days of actual chasing and many more for traveling. I drove across 10 states and put over 28,000 new miles on the ol’ 4Runner. I snapped over 90,000 time-lapse frames. I saw the most incredible mammatus displays, the best nighttime lightning and structure I’ve ever seen, a tornado birth caught on time-lapse and a display of undulatus asperatus that blew my mind. Wall clouds, massive cores, supercell structures, shelf clouds…it ended up being an amazing season and I’m so incredibly proud of the footage in this film.

The lightning storms and undulatus asperatus clouds at the end of the video are just flat-out spectacular.


Awaken, a documentary full of arresting imagery

This might be the most beautiful three minutes of your day. Director Tom Lowe is making a feature-length documentary “exploring humanity’s relationship with technology and the natural world” called Awaken. This trailer is stuffed with some of the most arresting imagery I’ve seen in a long time. Perhaps most striking is the moving time lapse footage, which was shot from a helicopter using equipment of Lowe’s own design…I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before.

Awaken will be out next year and, unsurprisingly, is being executive produced by Terrence Malick (Voyage of Time) and Godfrey Reggio (Koyaanisqatsi, etc.).


Unreal time lapse of undulating storm clouds at sunset

Storm-chasing photographer Mike Olbinski was recently taking photos of a storm in North Dakota close to sunset when asperitas clouds (aka undulatus asperatus clouds) appeared.

Undulatus asperatus clouds are a rare phenomenon and actually the newest named cloud type in over 60 years. I’ve seen tons of photos of them, but never anything like what we witnessed last night. We had a storm with hail in front of us and flashing lightning which was fantastic. But then we had this layer of undulatus clouds flowing across our view. Watching them was amazing already, but then the sun slowly appeared from behind some clouds to the west and lit up our storm like nothing we’ve ever seen before. We were like kids in a candy store.

Nature is ridiculous. More asperitas time lapse goodness here. (via bad astronomy)


4K supercell thunderstorm time lapse

I have said it before and I will say it again and you will get tired of me saying it for decades to come (or until Facebook just outright buys the internet and shuts down all independent media), but I will never ever tire of watching high-resolution time lapse videos of thunderstorms. Look at those gorgeous mammatus clouds!

Supercell thunderstorms are a manifestation of nature’s attempt to correct an extreme imbalance. The ever ongoing effort to reach equilibrium, or viscosity, is what drives all of our weather, and the force with which the atmosphere tries to correct this imbalance is proportional to the gradient. In other words, the more extreme the imbalance, the more extreme the storm.

I’ve had this up in a tab since last week but lost track of it…glad to rediscover it via Colossal.