thewayne | Entries tagged with solar eclipse

https://img.redbull.com/images/c_crop,x_0,y_700,h_1759,w_4396/c_fill,w_2050,h_816/q_auto,f_auto/redbullcom/2024/4/8/fxcdqq0aomkkyagujbkw/solareclipse

It's actually not easy to search for photos of Monday's eclipse because Google thinks you want information about Monday's eclipse, not photos of Monday's eclipse. However, the above link was shot Monday by the Red Bull Air Force which took an amazing amount of work to get it right. These people definitely earned their pay check, and IMO, an absolutely huge bonus!

We drove to Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas to the north, pretty much next to DFW airport. The weather was quite nice for the event and for the drive forth and back on Saturday and Tuesday. We were considering driving home Monday after the event, but with the paranoia about gridlock and such, we decided screw it and stayed an extra night. Which was good, we went back to a souffle restaurant (Rise Souffle - highly recommended! Three locations in the Dallas area.) and had a light dinner with a chocolate souffle for dessert! We expected somewhat terrifying weather on the return trip but both managed to dodge it and the storm system kinda wimped out.

I did get some photos, but I'm not very satisfied with them. I'm going to do some more Photoshop on them and if I can improve them to a satisfactory point, I'll post them. But I'm not holding my breath. You've all seen some pretty cool pix by now, I wouldn't be adding much to that collection.

Oh, and the sun isn't 93 million miles away, and this also proves that the earth and everything out in space is flat. Some of these twits claim they stare at the sun for five minutes a day with no ill effect.

The stupid is quite astounding. As is permanent, irreversible retina damage.

https://gizmodo.com/conspiracy-theorists-say-stare-at-eclipse-1851387594

*sigh* The brain rot is strong with this one. And I know it's not brain rot, it's an addiction to clicks.

Jones posted a clip that "illustrates how the trajectory of the most recent solar eclipse viewable in the United States, as well as the trajectory of the upcoming eclipse, form an “Aleph” and “Tav,” which (as anyone who was forced to go to Hebrew school instead of staying home and using cheat codes to make your Sims woo-hoo naked knows), are the first and last letters in the Hebrew language, signaling the beginning and end times.

In another eclipse tweet posted on March 26, which has 3.8 million views, Jones included a video of a man speculating that various Texas and Oklahoma counties had declared a state of emergency in order to usher in a billionaire-led new world order."

Uh huh.

I guess he likes drinking his own kool aid.

Many states have issued county alerts for the incoming tourists (of which my wife and I are two) who will be driving into totality path areas for increased traffic problems and potential communications problems as cell phone towers may become congested. We're driving over to Dallas Saturday and home Tuesday.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/solar-eclipse-conspiracy-theories-far-right-1234998475/

This is very bad since people can suffer permanent eye damage with these! They're nothing more than dark sunglasses, not the proper extremely dark eclipse-viewing glasses. A man bought a thousand eclipse glasses from a supplier from whom he'd previously purchased them, and found these were not as dark. Turned out the manufacturer hadn't sold them to that supplier in quite some time.

You can easily test your glasses to see if they're safe for eclipse viewing: "First, put your glasses on indoors and look around. The only things you should be able to see are very bright lights, such as a halogen bulb or a smartphone flashlight. Then, if the glasses pass the indoor test, bring them outside -- but don't look at the sun just yet. Look around: it should be too dark to see distant hills, trees or even the ground. If that second test is passed, keep the glasses on and quickly glance at the sun. You should comfortably see a bright, sharp-edged round disk. If your glasses pass all three tests, they are probably safe to wear."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eclipse-glasses-fake-counterfeit/

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: