9 Stunning Panoramas of Starry Skies, Captured With a Homemade Camera Rig

Last May Vincent Brady sold his belongings, moved out of his apartment and struck out on the road to document the night sky.

Last spring Vincent Brady sold most of his belongings, moved out of his apartment and struck out on the road to document the night sky. But instead of taking your typical long-exposure shots, Brady designed himself a custom camera rig that’s allowed him to capture stunning 360 panoramic images of the stars and Milky Way moving in concert. As Brady tells it, a couple years back he was experimenting with shooting 360 panoramas during the day and long exposure shots at night when it struck him that it might be pretty cool to combine the two techniques. It was a good instinct.

To make the rig, Brady took four refurbished Canon T2Is, stuck fisheye lenses on them, and attached the cameras to a wooden bracket. He starts setting up just as the sun goes down, and waits a couple hours until it’s dark as possible to begin shooting. “I put the rig on a tripod, clean the lenses, get the cameras synced up, and then I go take a nap,” he says. The cameras take photos every 1 or 2 minutes for 2 to 3 hours, or until his camera battery runs out. Brady usually walks away with 150 pictures from each camera during a session, which he then stitches together and layers using a custom script for the panoramic time lapse effect.

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Since he started on his road trip, he’s taken photos in Missouri’s Ozark region, British Columbia, Arizona, and Utah (his favorite place to shoot so far). “When I go out scouting locations, I bring the sky charts with me to try and figure out where the Milky Way will be,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t an astronomer when I started this, and I still don’t feel like one.”

Looking north you see the stars travel counterclockwise, rising in the east and setting in the west. Facing south you see them swirling the opposite way. Stitching the entire sky together turns Brady's swooshing star trails into the IRL version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Most of his shooting happens based on the moon cycle. “I have to keep tabs on the moon schedule,” he says. “It can wash out the sky.” And each season brings a different perspective on the stars. Brady says spring is his favorite time to shoot because the Milky Way hovers right above the horizon, which you can see in the Utah gif above.

For the time being, Brady is still driving around in his car, shooting at night and editing photos in coffee shops during the day. He has no plans to get off the road, though he plans to ditch his car for a trip to Iceland this fall. “I’m trying to plot a two-month stay there so I can can wait for the Northern Lights, clear skies and then shoot a lot.”