I have good news! For a mere Ulysses, I was able to revive my dead laptop. Its battery and dvd drive don’t work anymore, but I was able to install Tiger by booting to my first generation iPod. Having a spare laptop is worth well more than $50 to me. The final result is that I am now able to make timelapse movies again!

I have always loved timelapse videos of clouds rolling in the sky. My attempts to record them have been pretty poor so far, but I lucked out yesterday and got some footage of some really turbulent morning skies.

Things to watch for in the video:

1. I love the reddish tint to the top of the clouds as the sun rises.
2. It’s a bummer that my CCD camera blacks out an entire column when faced with direct sunlight.
3. It’s cool how, in the early afternoon, the clouds keep trying to come up over the horizon, but get burned away as soon as they do.
4. We had a clear blue afternoon.
5. Watch carefully between 9:15 and 9:45 as the Earth’s shadow rises up from the horizon.
6. The moon shoots up into the sky at almost exactly midnight.

Download Video (3.48 MiB)

The last part is pretty similar to my Moonrise video.