This time we watch the Hottop Coffee Roaster up close. I used my fisheye lens so I could look down the roasting chamber and down into the cooling tray.
You'll see:
The roaster preheat!
The green beans appear!
The beans churn!
The beans go from green to brown!
The beans GROW!
The beans cool!
A clock in the corner showing you how long things really took!
A strange man in the background fiddling with his iPad!
The settings I used made the exposure a little long so the drum and beans are somewhat blurry. And, like stagecoach wheels in old Westerns, the drum rotates the wrong way. When I set up the light, I didn't have anything in the roaster so I didn't notice that the camera was going to be shading part of the window. I did see that the light's reflection was there on the window but there isn't a lot going on in that part of the chamber. Well, there is the heating element...it might have been fun to see it glow and dim as the roast progressed.
The pictures were snapped every second and are played back at 30 frames per second. The 30 minutes go by in just one minute.
The last frame of the video was my camera's 168,813th picture. The shutter apparently is rated for 100,000 cycles. I suppose I ought to send it in for a checkup and maybe a new shutter.
2012 was supposed to be a great year for meteor showers.
It was a bust.
This year, the moon's phase was new or at least before first quarter on the nights of all the major meteor showers' peaks. This was going to give me excellent opportunities for time-lapse movies of meteors.
Each one was rained out.
The peak of the Geminid meteor shower was the morning of December 14. Jerry and I scheduled a vacation day for the 14th so we could stay out all night in a dark location and record the shower then catch up on sleep later in the day.
Unfortunately, the wrong kind of shower happened. It rained.
We went out around 10:00 the night of the 13th to see if the sky was clearing up but there wasn't a star to be seen. We went home. Around 12:30 I looked out the window and saw bright stars in a hole in the clouds. We bundled up and went out to our driveway and saw that the clouds were breaking up.
Instead of getting back in the car and trying to find a dark spot, we just set up our reclining camp chairs in the driveway. I set up the camera. Before the camera got ready to record the meteors that might outshine the cloudy, light-polluted sky, we got to see some really impressive shooting stars.
After the camera got snapping, there weren't a lot that were bright enough to see. And the clouds came back. But they cleared up again for a little while. Then they came back and started dropping rain on us. We had had enough after only an hour and a half.
I took 15-second exposures every 16 seconds. I ended up with 308 pictures. I found four whole meteors in those pictures. It wasn't an impressive meteor shower in Escondido.
Here's a little movie of that hour and a half. You get to see two views of the sky. The first part simply plays the images as they were exposed (they are somewhat overexposed) at a rate of 15 frames per second. The few meteors appear for only a single frame so you probably won't see any in the first part.
For the second segment, I darkened the sky to try to compensate for the exposure. The clouds got really wild with that treatment. I also stacked the images with each new image at full brightness and the previous images progressively fading. That made the stars have short trails and the meteors appeared then quickly faded. I added pointers to the meteors so you have a small chance of seeing them. I also added a timestamp to each frame so you can see time fly. The timestamps are on daylight saving time. I forgot to change the camera's clock when time fell back.
I see the Leonids and Geminids won't have the moon ruining the view next year. Let's hope the weather cooperates. I want to get a movie with meteors!
Your best chance to see the meteors in this video will be to watch in HD.
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