Panorama Photo

With this pano I will try to describe how short the day is around the latitude of Denmark, during the solstice (Sonnenwende). The stitching of severel photos can be usefull in many ways, as you can see here!

The pano was made from a tumulus (Hügelgrab) with a good view only 5 kilometers from my home. The view isn't a real hammer-one, but far better than from my backyard. As this experiment took at least 7 hours, I had to do a compromise, as my wife was at work.

The pano was made from pictures taken on 2011-12-17, which is close enough to this years shortest day, 2011-12-22. The perfect conditions of course would have been clear sky the whole day through, but as time went by and no high pressures was in sight, I was really lucky to have this one day with fine weather in a weekend.

To show this I needed pictures from sunrise, the maximum elevation around midday, and sunset. I feared it would take more pictures of the sun to show the point, but 3 proved enough. And the point is, of course, that in this time of the year the sun is only on a short visit.

The length of the day on this spot, on this day, is 6h59m, when measured from the center of the sun. Measured from the upper rim 5 min can be added (as the upper rim is the first to appear and the last to disappear). On 2011-12-22 the length was 6h57m, so the difference is only marginal.

When the sun reaches its maximum height during these days, it only crawles 10,5 degrees above the horizon. That proved just enough to stay within the frame of the camera held in the usual horizontal way, with a 50 mm lens.

Some numbers from the day:

Sunrise 8.41
Maximum 12.11
Sunset 15.40

The pano itself caused me a lot of headaches. When I loaded the pics (360 degrees with a little more in both ends) Hugin forced one of the end-picture behind the start picture too much, so half a picture disappeared. Maybe it\'s because all the pictures are made with the camera handheld. I tried to change the Field of View to less than 360 degrees but that didn\'t help. Then I remembered from another panorama discussion that Heinz Höra said something about when you make a pano from cropped images, then you must adjust the lens parameters to fit the crop. And maybe 360 degrees pictures, taken handheld, can be considered a small crop (a little ahead of the nodal point). So I tried to change the lens to 51mm, and voila: the pano didn\'t hook itself together anymore.

The standard in Hugin is exposure-correction, but that made the pano look awful, so I tried Jörg Nitz\' way with pano made from stacked pictures, and that turned out far better, I think.

If you don\'t find this sun-wandering interesting you may find the going from one time-period to another a bit too rough, but that is on purpose, as to emphasize the \"reality\"-sense of the experience. I chose to keep the sunrise and sunset parts as long as possible, because the midday part is awful to look in (in my opinion).

The panorama was made from 26 pictures, in 3 parts:

Sunrise part (9.04): 20 pictures, iso-200, f/10, 1/100s. Shadows lightened, and highlights lowered in Canon DPP.
Midday part (12.19): 1 picture, iso-100, f/32, 1/200s. Shadows lightened moderately and highlights lowered in Canon DPP.
Sunset part (15.28): 5 pictures, iso-200, f/10, 1/125s. Shadows lightened and highlights lowered in Canon DPP.

This time-panorama was in part inspired by these panos:
Christian Hönigs 1046 and 8834, and
Johann Ilmbergers 3778.

By the way, HAPPY NEW YEAR!