As with all technologies, there are tradeoffs. In timelapse photography of clouds, a timelapse movie with a 10-second time interval between frames readily captures the rolling motion in cumulus clouds. The main problems are the movies are larger for a movie of a given length of time and the camera used to make these movies, a Pentax W30 (which is waterproof!), takes a maximum of 1000 frames at a time, regardless of the memory card size. A timelapse movie of 1000 frames with a time interval of 10 seconds would represent 2.78 hours, which decreases the chances of observing interesting cloud phenomena if setting the camera up each morning before starting other projects. An experiment was made to visually examine what would be lost if the time interaval were increased up to 40 seconds (which would make a movie of 11.1 hours).

These movies of severe weather approaching Concord Academy, Concord, MA, have different time intervals. Examine what details are lost in cloud motion/change as the time interval is increased from 10 to 40 seconds.