Today was a pretty and cold overcast day.  We stayed in for most of it except for a quick trip to the train station to show Junie the choo-choos, (her term of course, not mine).  That was pretty awesome because we just happened to see two of the longest freight trains ever plus a christmas train as well.  You could tell her life was changed from seeing these things.

 

The rain sort of kept me indoors and swayed me from working on my telescope to pan & tilt conversion, although I did swing by the hardware store to prepare for it.  I did, however, have the music video on the mind today.  For those of you who don’t know, I am in the planning stages on a music video for a friends band.  Throughout the blog I have been experimenting with slit-scan techniques.  I thought it would be cool to do the music video based on this technique.

 

It’s the very reason why I’m converting this telescope into a remote controlled pan and tilt device for my camera.  Because the telescope has the ability to move very slowly at a constant rate it makes it perfect for creating clean slit-scan images.

 

This evening I decided to draw up the plans for how I was planning on mounting the camera to the telescope, but not only that, I decided to imagine other devices that would be interesting for the slit-scan effect.

 

A larger more simplified version of The Sphere Arm that I built on Day 152 would be very cool.  It would have to be balanced as well as mounted by a strong flange bearing that could give it smooth spinning motion.  This way you could have the camera smoothly fly in a perfect circle around the subject.  The slightest bump in the movement would completely disrupt the effect so a motor for speed control would be a plus.

 

Then, the same concept of the rotating camera is maybe more interesting to me as a rotating light source.  If it were the only light source spinning around a human being in a high contrast image it might look like that person were being peeled like the skin of an orange.

 

It was a good brainstorm and I think still a pretty realistic goal as well.