thewayne | Entries tagged with eclipse

PLEASE make sure you have proper ISO-rated protective glasses! You can buy them at Staples office supply for $3. The ones that I looked at today had an ISO number on the side and are the same ones that my wife's observatory was giving out to their employees, and they're good for three years.

Even if you're not in the path of totality, it should be a good show. I'm hoping for some good pix, and have a brand-new camera to play with! It also has a proper filter which cost a cool hundred bucks and drops the incoming light SIXTEEN f-stops! The new camera, a Canon R6 Mark 2, has an LCD viewing screen that tilts and pans, so it should be fairly easy to aim the camera without looking through the viewfinder - which is the recommended method - I won't even have to look up to photograph the sun! I also got a new quick-release shoe for my tripod, we'll see how that works out. Sadly, my new tripod hasn't shipped yet, I'm hoping that'll be here in the next month or two - it's a nice carbon fiber jobby!

I wanted the subject to say
At last, ~~the 1948 show~~Sunday's lunar eclipse photos!, but you can't embed HTML in post subjects. *sigh*

Things learned:
- 3 fused vertebrae in my neck makes high elevation photography a literal pain!
- Important - while phone is connected to the network, check camera time settings!
- I should try an experiment with the next full moon to see if the spot meter mode on my camera will yield accurate moon exposures. Don't know if that'll help with the next lunar eclipse, and thinking about it, it probably won't, but it might give me a better baseline exposure that I can compensate from more accurately.
- PACK THE FIRK-DING-BLAST RIGHT ANGLE VIEWFINDER ADAPTER! (see first item in list)
- Tracking telescope mount would be so marvelous to have! Canon has software that lets you control their DSLRs from a laptop via a USB cable. I think, but I'm not certain, that they give you an API set that you can write software to control the exposure. This might be handy in an eclipse setting.

I believe we're GMT -6, maybe -7. Can't remember. I was pleased that my SL1 clock was only 3 minutes slow, my 6D and Lumix were both spot-on for their clock setting. The weather worked in our favor: the temperature was slightly above freezing, but the really nice nice bit was that the wind was from the north and we were on the entrance patio on the south side - no icy blast! I didn't wear gloves at all and though my hands were decidedly cold, I had no problems working my cameras.

Almost all of these images, and unless otherwise noted, were taken with my SL1 with a 75-300 zoom at 300mm. Because the SL1 uses an APS-C sensor that is smaller than a 35mm negative's 24x36mm frame size, it causes a 1.6x focal length multiplier, making that 300mm effectively a 480mm telephoto, or for all practical purposes, a 500mm. Using Photoshop's ruler tool, if I'm using it right, the moon is taking about 655 pixels width - that's not a lot of resolution! But it's all the pixels that I've got until I get a lot more money to drop $2k on a lens and $4k or so on a body.

That ain't happenin' soon.

With most of these photos, they're not zoomed. I cropped them to a square format to center the moon, but otherwise this is 100% the frame size. I always shoot RAW + JPEG, so every exposure gives me two files: the raw sensor take plus a JPEG, where the camera does some optimizations and compresses the files. In my normal shooting, I always use the raw file and do some manipulations in Photoshop and usually get a better image than the JPEG. I've been doing some work on these images now and then since the eclipse on the raw files and I just haven't been happy with the results, then tonight I had an idea: why don't I take a look at the JPEGs! They've already been optimized by the camera, and honestly, the camera does a perfectly adequate job for posting online, so maybe they're good enough.

And by gosh and by golly, they mostly are!

So here's my eclipse photos from Sunday night!

One more thing about the SL1. It's one of Canon's earlier Eos cameras with a touch-screen LCD back, and it had a feature that I had forgotten about that proved very useful. If you use it in preview mode, it locked the mirror up and turns the LCD display into a live viewfinder. Fairly normal feature. But if you tap on your subject where you want it to focus, it focuses. OK, that's cool. Tap the subject a second time: it takes a photo! Proved very handy when shooting from a tripod and having trouble squatting down to look through a viewfinder!

I've embedded the timestamp and exposure in the lower right corner of each photo. As the aperture number increases, less light goes through the lens. Likewise, as the shutter speed increases, less light. As the ISO number increases, the sensitivity of the camera increases, so it needs to go up as the eclipse fullness increases and the moon becomes darker.

This first photo is early on in the eclipse, which ran from 20:36MST to 02:48.

The rest of the photos are under this cut, and as usual, clicken to embiggen.
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Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1115483.html

We didn't head north to see the eclipse, circumstances and money just didn't work out, thus my wife swapped with a co-worker to cover part of his shift: she is an operator on the Dunn Solar Telescope at Sunspot, the National Solar Observatory, he works on my wife's 3.5 meter. Thus, he is a Vampire and she is a Day Walker. My wife slept through the event, I drove over to Sunspot and participated.

Right off the bat, I didn't do enough prep work. My biggest mistake was not ordering a filter for my camera well in advance of the event! Oh, well. On top of that, I didn't get my photo gear together yesterday, and in getting it together this morning as I was getting ready to leave, I found that my tripod head was missing! My second head has been missing for some time, so my primary tripod was out of commission. Fortunately I also have a travel tripod, so my experiment was able to proceed.

The second mistake that I made was failing to grab a new memory card. When we were in Phoenix a couple of weeks ago, I took my Canon SL1 in to Tempe Camera Repair, a fantastic repair shop that I've used for over 30 years, to get the sensor cleaned. In doing so I removed the strap, tripod head, and memory card. I put all three parts in the camera bag and somehow a black hole formed and only the strap survived. Fortunately I found another 32 gig SD card, unfortunately I left it sitting on the dining table. So I only had my Lumix and my 6D for shooting with.

The experiment was thus, and probably a failure: in a forest area, such as where I live, an eclipse through tree leaves can have the same effect as a pinhole and you can see it that way. Sounded pretty neat to me, so I set up my 6D with the interval timer firing every 15 seconds from when the eclipse began until it ended. I'm later going to suck the images in to iMovie and see what I've got. I just finished unloading and categorizing the photos from the two memory cards, and thought I'd post three photos of the eclipse which are mildly nifty.

These were all taken in a rather unconventional manner: holding the lens of the safety glasses in front of my hand-held Lumix LX7. I was experimenting with exposure and only got one image of the moon eating the sun, so I was content.

One of the awesome features of my Lumix is that you can adjust the aspect ratio of the photographs! I set it to 1:1 for some photos, such as the first. For the second photo, I cropped it in Photoshop to 1:1, otherwise none of the images were adjusted in Photoshop.

The weather was not good. We had lots of thick clouds, and I thought: clouds are diffusers! I can directly shoot the sun through clouds! And thus, the first image, taken at 10:56 MST: