Terje Sørgjerd's video of "The Mountain" and the stars

[video link]

Last month, I posted Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sørgjerd's magnificent time-lapse video of the Aurora Borealis. Terje just emailed me that he has just returned from El Teide, Spain's tallest mountain and the location of Teidi Observatory. While there, he created a majestic video of the terrain and the heavens above. From his comment on the film:

The goal was to capture the beautiful Milky Way galaxy along with one of the most amazing mountains I know El Teide. I have to say this was one of the most exhausting trips I have done. There was a lot of hiking at high altitudes and probably less than 10 hours of sleep in total for the whole week. Having been here 10-11 times before I had a long list of must-see locations I wanted to capture for this movie, but I am still not 100% used to carrying around so much gear required for time-lapse movies.

A large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on the 9th April and at approx 3am in the night the sandstorm hit me, making it nearly impossible to see the sky with my own eyes.

Interestingly enough my camera was set for a 5 hour sequence of the milky way during this time and I was sure my whole scene was ruined. To my surprise, my camera had managed to capture the sandstorm which was backlit by Grand Canary Island making it look like golden clouds. The Milky Way was shining through the clouds, making the stars sparkle in an interesting way.

Terje Sørgjerd Photography

• [Anonymous]

  Thank you so much for sharing such an amazing video. I loved it and I found it very moving. I look forward to more of your inspirational work! Thanks again!

  Sheila

• [RebNachum]

  Two words: A Stonishing.

• [Anonymous]

  I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.

• [angryhippo]

  I need to get out of the city more often…

• [pencilbox]

  That was fantastic. Terje, thanks for creating something so moving.

• [SamSam]

  That was jaw-dropping. I want to go there right now. Will it be as pretty in July?

• [Anonymous]

  Wow, some of these scenes are incredible. I want this as a screen saver. Anyone know how I can do it?

• [MengerSponge]

  I agree, these videos are stunning. I could watch this for hours.

  It’s easy to forget how much is up there when you live in a crowded city, and your night sky is (at best) the moon and a handful of barely-visible stars obscured by buildings and light pollution. I wish I lived somewhere that afforded views like these.

• [nosehat]

  Lovely, tasteful, and artfully edited together. Thanks for sharing it!

  It also avoided my main pet peeve with other time-lapse videos: [potential spoiler alert?] The music started as gentle piano music… and it stayed in the same vein throughout. It successfully resisted the temptation to jump to generic, fast-tempo techno music after 8 bars, or half way through. Hooray!

• [Anonymous]

  A little bit of context on what we can see in the video:

  The Teide is located in Tenerife, one of the central Canary Islands, which are part of the Spanish territory but that are located near of the western coast of Morocco.

  It’s indeed a great place to watch the stars, but temperature at night (even is summer) is near to 0°C, making it an inusually cold spot in Tenerife.

  In the video we can see a forest of (endemical) pine trees that were planted during the Seventies as a government foresting policy. They were planted in a too high concentration, and since then some of then have been cut down to allow the proper developement of the forest. The layer of clouds we see is indeed called “sea of clouds”, and is formed when a layer of humid hair is trapped by a higher layer of hot air and condensates.

  We can also appreciate some local flora, like the Verode (2:05, right of the screen) and the Sabina Canaria (torn trees around 2:30).

• [Tritty]

  except for the fjords and coast this looks a bit like AZ, even a few norwegian cacti like plants
  it looks like

• [Anonymous]

  The music was so lovely that I was hoping for a credit at th end of the video. No such luck, dammit.

  • [Lujayn]

    Music credit is on Vimeo:
    http://vimeo.com/22439234

  • [Anonymous]

    The music is Nuvole Bianche by Ludovico Einaudi..Sound hound on my iPhone found it in 10 seconds…amazing!

• [Anonymous]

  that just chilled me out so much