The Moving Stars of the Southern Hemisphere

I present a short time-lapse video montage showing the motion of the southern hemisphere sky. The video shows four views looking in each direction, demonstrating how the sky moves “down under,“ in directions opposite to what northern hemisphere residents are used to. Stars still rise in the east and set in the west, but they rise moving at an angle to the left and set at an angle to the right. Looking north to the seasonal constellations, stars move from right to left, as the southern Sun does in the day. Looking to the south, to the south celestial pole and circumpolar stars, the sky turns clockwise around a rather blank area of sky. There is no prominent “south star.“ For those who wonder why I used a fish-eye lens, it was for a very good reason. Though a rectilinear lens would have provided a flat horizon, it would have also distorted the star tails into elongated ellipses due to the inherent distortion of such lenses. The fish-eye preserves a more natural appearance to the sky and its motion. I shot the time-lapse sequences over four nights in April 2016, at the annual OzSky Star Party, held near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. I used a Canon 6D and Canon 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens at f/2.8, taking about 450 frames for each sequence, each frame being a 45 second exposure at ISO 5000. I processed the images with Adobe Camera Raw and LRTimelapse, and created the frames for the star trail movies and stacked still images using the Advanced Stacker Plus actions from . Music is by Adi Goldstein / / with Broadcast license. To use this video in a commercial player or in broadcasts, please email licensing@ Forward all media requests relating to your video to our licensing team: licensing@