Eclipse Video!

The video

As exciting as the eclipse on April 8, 2024 was, it’s been a long road sorting through the thousands of images that I collected on that day. And I mean thousands. I’ve shown some already on another page. One of my goals was to collect enough images to end up with a better time-lapse movie than the one I made of the 2017 eclipse. So here it is:

Prior planning? Who needs that!

You’d think I’d learn something from the 2017 event, when I traveled to North Carolina to catch it. But I must say that as the day approached – I wasn’t that into it. Yes it would pass right over my home. But springtime in the Adirondacks is hit or miss, and I was convinced that we would have only a 30% chance of good weather on the day. Why go nuts planning when we’d probably get clouded out? And consider the nasty, wet & heavy snowfall we received on April 4th, just four days before the eclipse! But holy cow batman – the weather reports kept looking favorable for April 8th! After cleaning up the fell trees and power outage, I thought maybe I should have bought that new camera lens I’d been thinking of. Too late!

I knew that the focal length of my CPC-800 telescope was a little too long for recording a solar eclipse, such that the Sun nearly fills the entire field of my camera. Too bad, because the view through the telescope was superb! But I wanted to try capturing the expanse of the corona and I was afraid it would be cropped. I needed an even shorter focal length than I’d get with my added f 0.63 reducer.

So, plan B was to use a long camera lens while piggy-backing the camera on the telescope so the camera tracks along with it. This is what I did in 2017 but sadly, the camera lens with its wider field of view – just isn’t as sharp as the telescope. Hence my belated thoughts of buying a better camera lens, or even a different telescope! Oh well.

I set up the camera to take exposures every ten seconds throughout the event. These were bracketed by a couple of f-stops – one slower, one faster than each base exposure, which were mostly either 1/640 or 1/800 of a second @ 400 iso. So three each. I recorded both raw and jpeg images. This all adds up to thousands of images, and I ended up nearly filling a 64 GB SD card.

It was a major job to sort through them all. And not only that – I wanted to pull out detail in the solar surface of the sunspots and other features of the surface, so it didn’t appear as just a white disk. That meant applying some basic processing like a base set of curves to each exposure, and aligning the frames to compensate for drift over the several hours of exposures and with a shifting atmosphere.

And that last part? I couldn’t find a computer algorithm that would accurately align the images as they changed from a round disk to a half eaten cookie, to a diamond ring! So I ended up aligning 792 of them by hand to make this movie! Yikes!

I learned a lot along the way. Like, your cameras focus will vary as it bakes in the sun for several hours. And – you’d better be darned careful while removing and replacing the solar filter during totality (so as to not hit the manual focus ring). Oh well, I’ll catch the next one in twenty years, and by then maybe I’ll know better?

One thing’s for sure, it was a joy to experience the eclipse right from my own spot on earth. And talking to drivers in a line of stalled traffic when it ended – rather than joining them!