An update in the following thread had perfect timing and triggered me to start this post
Over the weekend I started setting up some new camera gear in preparations for the Solar Eclipse next week. I’m inside the area of totality and plan on setting up on my back patio.
I picked up the star tracker and lens for this event as an excuse to help me get into astrophotography afterwards. The lens is an EF 70-300, which on my crop sensor should give me a 480mm effective lens.
Now I’m seeing that we might end up with rain next week. If it doesn’t rain, the clouds may add some interesting artifacts to the photos.
My plan is to set up the star tracker to trigger the camera to take 1 photo every minute. I have magic lantern installed on my camera. One of it’s features is the ability to do bracketing. I’ve been playing with that and have it working to do 11 photos from 1/1000 → 1" without change aperture or ISO while only pulling the trigger once. So during the time of totality, I’ll turn on the bracketing, unplug the trigger from the star tracker and manually trigger the camera a few times. I’m hoping this gives me some good shots of the corona at various exposures.
Once totality is over, I’ll plug the start tracker’s trigger back into the camera and let it run another hour or so taking photos every minute again.
It’s supposed to rain today, but should be sunny Wednesday and Thursday for me to set this up outside and take some practice shots with it. I have a 128G SD card coming in today which should hold something like 4000 photos on it. Should be enough to capture the event I really only got the new card because my current 64G one is a very slow 90mb/s card and I’ve been doing more youtube videos that take a long time to transfer off of the card. The new card has a 200mb/s read.
Just curious, anyone here plan to travel in order to view the eclipse?
I’ll be at work on eclipse day but my office is actually a pretty good viewing location with 2 minutes and 12 seconds of totality so I’ll be coming to work with the appropriate protective eye wear. Fingers crossed the weather cooperates.
Did some testing this morning before the clouds came out. I still have lots to learn and a short time to do it. More testing tomorrow.
The ‘big’ movements are me trying to center the sun in the camera. These photos were taken 30 seconds apart. Small movements make big changes at 480mm.
We would love to go. Dallas is probably the closest for us, but also half the country. And there are a lot of predicted clouds. We’re going to have to skip the risk, unfortunately. We enjoyed the 2017 eclipse a lot, but my youngest wasn’t born yet and my oldest was a bit too young to appreciate it.
Was hoping to get something showing both the Jacob Hamblin arch and the eclipse, but the extreme contrast difference and perspective difference conspired otherwise.
That’s where the bracketing comes in. I’ll be able to take multiple photos in rapid succession at various exposure lengths. Then I can use stacking software to make a single composite of the multiple images. I’ve done this before for other photos where I wanted both the foreground and background viewable.
The event is over here at this point. The day started off very overcast and stayed that way most of the morning. We got some spotty views of the event. Then at the time of totality, most of the clouds went away. I’m hoping the camera snagged some good shots. Since I didn’t have a good view of the sun prior to the event, I couldn’t dial in the star tracker. I had to keep adjusting it slightly to keep the sun in the viewfinder. Very annoying.
It was really cool during the event. Our chickens did not go in to roost, but everything got quiet.
Here’s some preliminary photos from the camera. Post processing of everything will be done this evening. Sadly, I won’t be able to do the time-lapse video I wanted to do because of all the cloud cover. I think only a few shots of the pre-totality part of the event will come out.
If anyone is interested, here’s a temperature graph for the period around the eclipse, the lowest point occurred about five minutes after totality, at this location, there was 2 minutes and 12 seconds of totality . BTW, the temperature is the blue line, it’s degrees Celcius and the time scale is UTC (that’s EDT+4 hrs)
In my yard, we did not have totality (71%). But you can see the temperature shift anyway. I was popping in and out of the house during the eclipse and I thought it looked significantly dimmer. Here is my temperature sensor (in degrees F). The peak was at 12:40pm here:
@niget2002, I’m super glad you got to see it. I hope your photos turned out at least good enough to remember part of today. But I bet they are even better than that.
I only got a little sliver in norther Cali, but sunglasses and a shade 10 welding helmet was pretty good. Could not tell it was happening without looking at it. bright and hot the whole time.
Here’s the mostly final images from the camera. I never got a good shot of the sun leading up to the event to get the focus right, so everything is a bit blurry. Fighting the clouds made for some interesting exposures. you can almost make out some solar flares on the one photo. I have another picture where the flares are more pronounced that I still need to edit.
I think we had 80+% here in eastern Iowa. I didn’t wander outside, but it looked like those low-budget films with a filter. It got darker, but not atmospheric (Rayleigh?) scattering to change the hue, and the shadows never moved. Watched livestreams on YouTube… If I had more motivation or energy, I’d have wandered the streets with an “The End is Nigh!” sign, or maybe some Lovecraftian eldritch doom chants about the sun being eaten…
But, Code Monkey has to (re)write … gosh-darned … login page himself…
I really only got the new card because my current 64G one is a very slow 90mb/s card and I’ve been doing more youtube videos that take a long time to transfer off of the card. The new card has a 200mb/s read.
If I had more motivation or energy, I’d have wandered the streets with an “The End is Nigh!” sign, or maybe some Lovecraftian eldritch doom chants about the sun being eaten…