Video: Crescent Moon Chasing Golden Sunset, Venus Leading the Way

Doing digital time lapse photography-videography is both a crap shoot -- and sometimes captures serendipitous & fun surprise results.  Time lapse of sunset also "caught" Moon set -- and semi rare conjunction of Venus / Mercury. First the 90 sec time lapse video results -- then some details:

Time lapse: Crescent Moon chasing Golden

Sunset w/ Venus leading the way (90 sec)

Fun & serendipitous "extra" capture? Even w/ this old tablet camera & hardware, accidentally "caught" semi-rare conjunction of Sun, Moon, Venus & Mercury.  Sky chart detail:

Western Sky Sunset & Schematic

of Moon, Venus, Mercury & Sun

(from: [2108] March [Sunset] Guide to Bright Planets ) 

More 2018 sunset details?  See this 3 min animation for 2018 Venus set vs Moon set:

Western Sky Sunset & Animation of 

Venus sky path thru 2018

Why this effort?  Video is the new paper in a digital world.  This author is on a steep "catch up" learning curve -- after 20+ years not really "doing" photography -- now exploring "dry" digital tools & techniques. When photography was "wet" -- film, chemicals, developers, enlargers, hang dry, etc etc -- the work flow friction became too high -- and faded from my skills repertoire.  Now that every "smart phone" -- even inexpensive smart phones -- most have surprisingly "good" cameras -- and beat hands down the workflow friction of 35mm film.

Nerd Details: This was a sunset time lapse test of refurbished 2011 Samsung 7" Tab2 (PT-G3113) Android tablet using "Open Camera" app, version 1.42.2 by Mark Harmon. Frame rate: 2.0 secs. Video assembled from 2286 JPEG images into 30 fps video using FFMPEG Linux shell command:

 cat *.jpg | ffmpeg -r 30 -f image2pipe -i - out_video.mp4 

How does this command work?  How are single still images "stacked" into a video?  Without wading into the deep details, starting in a folder populated by 2286 JPEG images -- captured & stored in time sequence order -- the "cat *.jpg" feeds one image file after another by "Globbing" *.jpg files into  a Unix-Linux "pipe" (the vertical line character "|") -- and images emerging from this pipe are "read" by FFMPEG -- by the UNIX-Linux "stdin" token dash ("-") -- one after the other -- and assembled frame-by-frame into a video encoded file "out_video.mp4".  There are herds of defaults exploited by this "simple" command.  See details at: https://www.ffmpeg.org/faq.html 

SUMMARY?  In a digital world, video is the new paper.  Most folks will watch a 30-120 sec video -- BEFORE they will read an Email. To speak to this challenge & need -- learning to "write" in video short stories is a key skill.  And fun tool, now that the "wet" photography process has been captured by low cost camera phones.