Summer Solstice Fireflies

It’s always a little magical when you walk outside on a quiet summer evening and see the backyard lit up with fireflies. No camera will ever truly do them justice, but it’s fun trying to photograph them anyway.

On the first full day of summer I set my cell phone on a table and set it to record a 20 minute video while I sat and enjoyed the beautiful evening.

To create an image I wrote a python script to convert the 20 minute video to ~34,000 individual images and then combined them together in StarStax. StarStax essentially goes through each image and takes the brightest pixel at each location, so with this method each firefly should show up and remain on the final image.

Those little bugs are very busy over a 20 minute time span! As time went on they seemed to migrate from the lawn back into the bushes and trees in the back of the yard. I cut the 20 minutes into 7 different images and animated them to show the effect.

Last year I tried taking a similar photo with my telescope camera with an all sky lens to capture the whole backyard. I thought that would be good because it’s meant for such low light conditions, but the cell phone worked wonderfully!