The beach camera quit after only 31 hours after all. And I managed to leave a fingerprint smudge on the glass cover despite my best efforts to clean it up. Also, it seems that no matter what settings I try, I can’t prevent the stitcher from deforming the image around the stitch line. So it’s not perfect. Still, I hope you’ll find this timelapse enjoyable.

Instead of playing the first night as a simple linear timelapse, I figured it would look cool if I “kept the shutter open” so-to-speak and let the star trails build up over time.

I think this is as good as I can get the Ricoh Theta X - a consumer camera from yesteryear that’s definitely not meant to take thousands of low-light shots for hours on end - to produce 360° timelapse videos and star trails. I’m definitely thinking of rolling my own nighttime camera at this point.