April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Sungrazer Comet

Click to enlarge

Some news headlines leading up to the total solar eclipse last week suggested we might be able to see the "Devil Comet" (12P/Pons-Brooks) during totality, though with binoculars or a telescope, not naked-eye. We didn't see it but then we even forgot to use our binoculars to look at the eclipsed sun during totality much less remembered to use them to look for the comet.

I was asked whether the comet might appear in the photos I was taking with my telescope and my answer was, unfortunately no, it was well outside the field of view of my equipment. 

However, I was excited to see an article in my news feed late last night describing a comet passing close enough to the sun to fit in a telescopic field of view. Called SOHO-5008, it was a sungrazer, a comet passing so close to the Sun it would appear in coronagraph images by the SOHO solar satellite. This one had been identified in SOHO images the morning of the eclipse and several people found that they had captured it in their eclipse images. Later that day, it had burned up in the Sun. 

This morning, I pulled up my own images from totality and found that I had captured it, too! It took bumping up the exposure far more than I usually would but, once I did that and made a few other adjustments to bring out more detail, there it was. Here is an edit with labels similar to an image from my last post, noting some of the brighter stars visible from constellation Pisces and adding an enlarged inset for the comet. 

I may do another edit later on to balance out the overall image but i wanted to go ahead and share this now. 

Pretty cool, huh?

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Fine Detail in Corona

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole this week, assuming that to really get sharp detailed images of totality I needed to go through the rather involved process of using calibration frames to process all of the images I planned to stack before trying to stack, register and merge them. After spending a few evenings starting down that road, I took a break and in reviewing tutorials on processing solar eclipse images I ran across several that describe doing everything directly in Photoshop without the use of registration frames. 

Following the process described in this Sky & Telescope article, I created the image above using a set of images shot at 2 stop intervals from 1/4000th of a second to 1 second, all shot at f/5 and ISO 100 with my Nikon D750 through our Sky Watcher Evostar 72ED telescope. 

Click on it to enlarge and check out the incredible detail. You'll find features like:

• Plenty of detail in the solar corona
• Solar prominences
• The lunar surface illuminated with light reflected from Earth (Earthshine)
• Several stars from the constellation Pisces

This is just the first phase of edits described in the article so more to come. In the meantime, I did a separate version with features labeled. 

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Sun Funnel in Use

As described in a previous post, I assembled a Sun Funnel to use on our Parks 60mm refractor with the tracking motor running to keep the Sun in the field of view as it across the sky during the April 8th total solar eclipse. 

Our family members who gathered to watch the eclipse enjoyed having an alternative to staring at the Sun through eclipse glasses. It worked great! 

In this clip, you can see the partially eclipsed Sun, a sunspot and even clouds drifting by.

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Initial Telescopic Images

Fine details in the solar corona

One of my primary goals for this total solar eclipse was to capture a variety of telescopic views of the eclipse. The similar goal I had in 2017 was spoiled by overcast skies that resulted in a mad dash down the road with Beau Hartwig chasing clear skies. Seeing totality with my own eyes meant giving up on my photographic goal. I don't regret that for a minute but I was thrilled that this time the skies cleared for us just in time for the "Big Show". 

To avoid having to split my attention between experiencing totality and taking pictures, I used our old 2012 MacBook Pro running a software package called Solar Eclipse Maestro to control the camera, snapping pictures at pre-defined times and exposure settings. SEM worked flawlessly and had it not been for a user-error on my part (which I'll cover in a future post), I would have captured everything I planned for. As it is, I still was able to capture most of what I planned including:

• Diamond Ring effect (though not as spectacular as that from other people due to my snafu)
• Baily's Beads effect
• Solar corona fine detail
• Earthshine (lunar surface illuminated with light reflected from Earth)
• Partial phase images (though I missed much of the first half of the eclipse due to clouds)
• a full set of images and calibration frames I have submitted for the NASA-based science project called the Eclipse Megamovie

Although the images captured were as good or better than I hoped, post-processing them to fully bring out the available detail is a rather complicated thing involving a variety of software tools. I am still working on that but I wanted to go ahead and share some initial edits. 

The image above is a blend of each of the 19 different shutter speeds used to capture images to submit to the Eclipse Megamovie project. They were taken during totality to capture as much fine detail of the solar corona as possible. The project team will use the calibration frames to pull out even more detail than appears in this image but, for my first pass at this I used some basic stacking techniques in Photoshop. Click on it to see enlarged... isn't the level of detail incredible?

I'm also including some cursory edits I've done of a few other images below including a partial phase image and a picture of Baily's Beads. What I am the most excited about though is the spectacular solar prominences that appear in the Baily's Beads shot. Wow! Even more incredible is that the largest one was visible naked-eye. 

Once I've had time to go through the rest of my images and finish some of the more complicated editing processes, I'll share more of these. I'll also do a follow-up post on my equipment and what went into capturing these images. 

I hope you got a chance to see totality for yourself but, if not, please enjoy my first pass at sharing the view with you. 

Late in the partial phase of the eclipse. Note the sunspot in the center!

  

Baily's Beads and Solar Prominences

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Timelapse of Totality over Ellis County, Texas

UPDATE: Now that I've had time to work on some of my other images and videos, I went back and remixed this one to fix some things I rushed the first time around. In this edit the sky appears darker, closer to what we saw that day, so the coronal ring around the Sun stands out better. 

Another total solar eclipse imaging projects I planned to do is a timelapse sequence of the eclipse. In 2017 I tried shooting the entire eclipse but this time I just focused on the 5 minutes before totality, the 4+ minutes of totality and the 5 minutes after. Unlike 2017, we had much clearer skies and this came out pretty much just as I planned. Thanks to Alan Dyer (amazingsky.net) for the tips in his book on shooting the eclipse, specifically the tips on shooting a wide-angle timelapse!

To capture this, I set up my son Brian's Nikon D750 with our Irix 15mm f/2.4 wide-angle lens on a tripod at the corner of my son Chris' yard where we were observing the eclipse. My D750 was in use on the telescope so a big thanks to Brian for the use of his camera!

The sequence was shot with the internal intervalometer set to capture an image every second for 15 minutes with the timer set to start it at 1:35pm so that I didn't have to remember to start it on time. I set exposure ramping on so the camera would automatically adjust the exposure as the sky got darker and brighter, then set the exposure compensation to +1.33 so that it wouldn't be heavily overexposed during the pre- and post-totality shots. 

Once at home, I processed the 900 images in LRTimeLapse and Lightroom Classic to create a video clip from the images and then added titles, adjusted track speed and added music in DaVinci Resolve. This is the finished product! 

A few things to watch for in the video:

• At about the 18 second mark, look for the small star to lower right of the Sun. That's not a star, it is the planet Venus!
• The contrail at lower center is probably a commercial aircraft, possibly one of the one flying along the eclipse path to prolong how long they could watch totality. 
• At about the 36 second mark, the "insect" flittering about above us in the drone landing after shooting the arrival and departure of the lunar umbra. 

Enjoy!

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Preliminary Sensor Data

As I shared in an earlier post, one of the many projects I planned for the total solar eclipse involved doing data collection with a variety of sensors based on ESP32 microcontrollers. I haven't done any detailed analysis of the results yet but based on a quick review of some of the sensor data there are clear changes that are in line with what I expected. 

First up is the ambient air temperature measured with a BME280 sensor for temperature, relative humidity and air pressure. 

The air temperature certainly dropped which makes sense given the gradual and then sudden drop in UV sunlight. Interestingly, the drop lagged the eclipse by about 15 minutes with totality starting at 1:40pm local time and the lowest temperature being reached at about 1:55pm. The higher temperature in towards the end of the eclipse makes a little sense given before totality had been mostly cloudy and after totality was mostly clear. I am not yet sure what explains the dip at 2:55 or the temperature reaching over 110 at the end of the eclipse. It wasn't that hot where we were so I have some research to do. 

For air pressure, it appears there was a general trend down. Obviously, air pressure changes are related to broader atmospheric conditions. I suspect I needed to have data from a much longer period before and after the eclipse to have any chance of seeing any form of correlation.

As relative humidity generally has an inverse relationship to temperature (though it can be influenced by other factors), these results are what I would have expected. 

Next up is light level measurements. I used two sensors, an AS7341 color spectrum sensor and a TSL2591, a light level sensor. The AS7341 data will take more analysis to make sense of though it does show light levels in all frequencies it measures dropped to nearly zero during totality. The light levels in lux from the TSL2591 are pretty easy to understand. 

This completely aligns with totality which in the location in Ellis County, Texas, where we were started at 1:40pm and ended 4 minutes 16 seconds later. The left side of the graph makes sense as it was mostly overcast with the Sun occasionally poking through in the period prior to totality, hence the graph peaks and valleys before 1:40pm. The right side of the graph also makes sense. It was generally clear for about an hour after totality but with it turning partly cloudy again in the last half hour. Unlike the start of the eclipse, it was mostly clear skies with large clouds blocking the sun here and there. 

Although this is all very preliminary, just taking a glance at data results via the Home Assistant UI, these seem very much in line with changes expected during a total solar eclipse. If I find other meaningful results as I get time to do a more detailed analysis, particularly the sound level data and the color spectrum data, I'll post that, too. \

Click on a graph to see them enlarged. 

PS. 
As I expected, the magnetometer data collected with a QMC5883L doesn't appear to show any magnetic field changes that might correlate to the eclipse. I'll leave that science to the professionals!

April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Lunar Umbra View from Drone

This is a aerial view of the arrival and departure of the Moon's shadow, the lunar umbra, over Ellis County Texas during the total solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024. 

We launched the drone just ahead of totality programmed to hover till the arrival of the lunar umbra and then orbit to film the horizon during totality. 

The sky got darker than I remembered from the 2017 total solar eclipse but the way things looked as the umbra arrived, growing darker first from one direction, and then as it departed, growing light first from the direction it had arrived, was the same as to 2017. 

Thankfully, we had relatively clear skies but the effect would have been similar even if it had been completely overcast. I had hoped that as the drone orbited it would capture the full 360 degree sunset effect along the horizon but it was too cloudy. You can get just a sense of it at the 58 second mark in the video. 

The total phase of the eclipse at this location was 4 minutes 16 seconds. However, as the focus for this video is on the visual experience of the sky getting dark with the arrival of the umbra and growing light again with its departure, the duration of totality is edited down to about 22 seconds. As the Sun was about 65 degrees above the horizon, it was not possible to include the eclipsed solar disk in this video. 

PS.

After posting this, I ran across a similar drone video from 2017 that doesn't show the lunar umbra arrival and departure but it does show the 360 degree sunset effect. Check it out here. 

Details:

Filmed from a DJI Mini 2 drone.

Processed on Mac OS with

DaVinci Resolve 

Music

"Eclipse"

by 1st Contact

Shared under Creative Commons License

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Data Collection Plan for Total Solar Eclipse 2024

First of all, if you've been watching the weather forecasts, you may have concluded that the total solar eclipse passing through Dallas on Monday will be a bust. Well, don't give up hope, yet. Even though we got clouded out in 2017 on our trip to Marshall, Missouri, as you would see in my post from back then, I still managed to capture of view of totality through the clouds. All it takes is for the clouds to part a bit at just the right time or the clouds to be high altitude and thin for us to still be able to see totality. Regardless of the forecast, be sure to get outside to see what there is to see!

Even if we are clouded out, you'll still experience one aspect of a total solar eclipse: it will get dark! With that in mind, I expect to have a successful day whether I get to see the total eclipse or not. I have a bunch of microcontrollers (ESP32) with sensors that I'll be using to collect data that day. 

That said, you may find that my approach to data collection is a bit unorthodox. Here's part of my setup for data collection. Yes, that is a Nonni's biscotti box. :-D

Seriously, here's the type of data I'll be collecting:

- light levels for visible light and near infrared (lux)

- light spectrum levels in various wavelengths

- environment: temperature, humidity, air pressure
- sound level changes (dB)

- magnetic field changes

WARNING: you may be a geek if you keep reading beyond this point. 

TL;DR

The architecture I'm using builds on infrastructure I already have in place. I use Home Assistant running on a Raspberry Pi for my home automation, control and historical data. Home Assistant supports integrating data sensors using microcontrollers called an ESP32 via a system called ESPHOME. By attaching various sensor components to an ESP32 then configuring it in ESPHOME, it makes it simple to automatically collect sensor data in Home Assistant for storage, retrieval, monitoring and analysis. 

Here is an example of a historical data graph in Home Assistant. The beauty of this besides being able to quickly visualize data is that Home Assistant also makes it easy to download the data for analysis in other tools. 

My original plan was to set things up to collect data through three full days, the day before, of and after the eclipse. Given the prospect of clouds and, more importantly, the forecast for rain on Tuesday, I've scaled back to just trying to collect data in the hours around the eclipse. I considered creating weatherproof enclosures for the sensors but that would have turned a shoestring-budget project into something quite a bit more expensive. 

After things have wrapped up, I'll pull up history for all the sensor devices in Home Assistant and download the data for further analysis.

As for the details of the sensors I'm planning to deploy, let's start with the light sensors. You can see details of the code plus the specific sensors in this gist on github.com. For this sensor package, the ESP32 and the sensors are mounted on a breadboard that is in the bottom of the biscotti box.

The reason is that my goal is to measure changes in ambient light. For various (and technical) reasons, direct sunlight would be more challenging to measure with these sensors. Given we should see a drop in ambient light levels (and color levels) during totality even if it is cloudy, I think the data will be more predictable and meaningful just measuring ambient light. Pointing the sensors straight up and blocking them from direct sunlight should accomplish this. 

One thing you'll see in the ESPHOME code for each sensor package is that they generally report data back to Home Assistant once a minute but include a switch I can turn on that tells the sensor to send measurements every second (or faster). I have Home Assistant automations set up to flip the high speed data collection switch on for each sensor package a little while before the eclipse starts and turn it back off a little while after the eclipse ends. That way once I set things up Sunday evening or Monday morning, I can focus my attention on the eclipse, leaving the data collection to happen automatically. 

On one side of the outside of the box is another ESP32 mounted on a breadboard with a sensor to measure the environment. Here's the gist with the ESPHOME including details on the sensor.  It will collect data on temperature, relative humidity and air pressure. The code also derives absolute humidity and dew point. 

Based on things I have read including published eclipse science projects, we should certainly see a change in temperature as the Moon's umbra passes over us during totality. Relative humidity has an inverse correlation to temperature so I expect to see changes to it that are similar to the temperature changes (but inverted). I have no idea what to expect in terms of changes in absolute humidity, air pressure and dew point but it will be interesting to see if there are changes that match the timing of the eclipse. 

On the other side of the box is an ESP32 with a digital microphone. This one is set up to measure changes in sound levels throughout the eclipse. You'll see in the gist, this is based on a custom ESPHOME component. It provides sound levels in several forms but my interest is in just having the unfiltered (raw) sound levels. 

Measuring changes in sound levels that can correlate to the total phase of the eclipse may be challenging. Although it may "get quiet" in terms of reactions to the darkness by birds and insects, my guess is that loud expressions of joy during totality by folks gathered with us to observe the eclipse may offset any drop in sound levels by nature. 

The last sensor package I've put together was an afterthought. I had one more ESP32 and also had a sensor that is a magnetometer, one that measures changes in magnetic fields in 3 axis. See this gist for the ESPHOME code which includes details of the sensor. The ESP32 I'm using in this case also happens to be much smaller than the others which seemed like to a good idea for a sensor trying to measure changes in local magnetic fields. 

Based on my research, there have been changes in magnetic fields around Earth measured during past total eclipses but those measurements were performed with sophisticated equipment in the upper reaches of the atmosphere or in space. I don't have any reason to expect that I'll measure any changes that correlate to the timing of the eclipse with my simple magnetometer setup but I figure I'll do the data collection and see what happens. 

For this sensor package, I've mounted the sensor on top of a wooden yardstick with the ESP32 below and a Wi-Fi antenna below that. My plan is to have this mounted on a stake well away from structures and people to minimize other magnetic fields nearby. However, that means it's further to the Wi-Fi router, hence the extra antenna. I'm also using a power pack instead of using a power adapter plugged into AC power. This means the only limitation on where I can put this will be how far from the house I get before the Wi-Fi signal drops. 

Sometime next week when I have had time to review and analyze the data collected on Monday, I'll write up my conclusions and share them here. 

Just two days and a wake-up before show-time!

Stay tuned!

ISS Lunar Transit Mesquite Texas: Composite Image

As I shared in my last post, I was up in the very early hours this morning to catch a unique event, the International Space Station (ISS) passing in front of the Moon, a lunar transit. What I didn't share in that post is why I used the video mode on my Nikon D750 instead of taking individual photos. 

The D750 is a great camera with some powerful capabilities. It has a top capture speed of 6.5 frames per second. Unfortunately, it can't sustain that speed for long. After about a dozen shots, the buffer fills up and the camera slows to closer to 1 frame per second or even 1 every two seconds. With an event that only lasts about 6 tenths of a second, since the camera only shoots at 6.5 frames per second for about 2 seconds, it would take perfect timing to be able to capture any part of the transit. If I started shooting 4 or 5 seconds too soon or too late, I might miss it all together. 

However, with a video mode of 60 frames per second, I just had to start recording well before the start of the transit and then let it run long enough to be sure the transit was over before stopping the camera. Thankfully, when I was scrambling to finish focusing this morning and realized it was almost time for the transit, starting the video and letting it record for a few minutes was enough to capture the transit and capture far more frames with the ISS than I could have even if the D750 could capture images at 6.5 frames per second indefinitely. Using video has its drawbacks, e.g., things in motion (and the ISS moves incredibly fast) inherently have a little blur, even with a really fast shutter speed, but capturing more images with the ISS in them and having a bit more flexibility in starting/stopping the capture was worth it. Perhaps someday I'll get another chance to do this and will try capturing it with images instead of video. 

To create the image above, I went through the video with Lightroom, selecting each frame with the ISS and exporting it as a JPEG file. I then took these files and opened them in Photoshop as levels. By using auto-align and auto-blend, Photoshop produced a single composite image showing the track the ISS took across the Moon. I decided that the first draft was a bit busy so I did it over again just using every other ISS frame to produce this photo. I also applied some intelligent sharpening to make up for the camera being a little out of focus. It's not great but I am satisfied with it. 

Click on the image to see enlarged. Enjoy!

 

ISS Lunar Transit Mesquite Texas

I have captured images of the International Space Station (ISS) passing overhead before but I've never captured an ISS transit. Until now!

Every few weeks I check transit-finder.com to see whether there are solar or lunar transits happening nearby. Earlier this week I found that there would be one early AM this morning. 

Lots of things have to come together just right to see the ISS cross in front of the Sun or the Moon. 

• A location on the Earth where the ISS passes directly in between that location and the Sun or Moon.
• The ISS has to be close enough to the Earth for its angular size (how big it appears in the sky) to stand out. My sources indicate it's best when the ISS has an angular size of at least 42 arc seconds. 
• A time of day or night when there will be enough contrast for the ISS to stand out against the given object. For the Sun, this is pretty straightforward but a transit in front of the Moon when it's up during daylight makes for a more challenging capture. 
• And, of course, you have to be able to see the event so that means little or no clouds. 

The last few times there's been one in the area, the weather didn't cooperate but this time it was pretty clear. The location was within 15 minutes of home and the ISS was forecast to have an angular size of 59.72 arc seconds. 

A little before midnight, I packed up my equipment and Luna in the car and headed to the area where Linda, Lexie and I used to take walks when we lived in Mesquite. With a tripod, mount, telescope, camera and other gear, I needed a spot where I could set up next to the car so I had to scout a few spots looking for a place without too much bright light, on public property, and with a clear view of Polaris (to align the mount) and the Moon. I finally settled on the parking lot at the Palos Verdes Lake Park. Unfortunately, that chewed up enough time that I was still trying to get a sharp focus on the Moon when I realized it was time for the transit. I went ahead and started video rolling, let it go for a few minutes and then packed things up and headed home. 

Today, sitting down with the video I was thrilled to find I had captured it! The focus is not great but it is clear enough to be able to see the ISS moving across the face of the Moon. The entire event was just over a half a second so shooting at 60 fps I caught about 30 frames of the ISS. 

I'm sharing the video for now. Later, I'll work on putting together a photo that captures the entire event in one image.

Be sure to watch full-screen for the best view of the transit. 

In the meantime, here are the technical details:

SkyWatcher Evostar 72ED

0.85 Focal Reducer/Flattener

2X Teleconverter

Nikon D750 (DX mode)

Deep Sky Dad AF3 focusing motor

60fps video at ISO 3200 1/4000th second shutter speed

SkyWatcher Star Adventurer GTi mount

Radian Carbon Fiber tripod

Edited in DaVinci Resolve 

Event details:

See transit-finder.com screenshot below. The centerline crossed the trail just north of Northwest Drive. I captured this video from the park parking lot (not shown in this diagram but it's at the northwest tip of the lake).

Countdown to April 8th: Sun Funnel Project

As I mentioned in my last post, I have a lot of irons in the fire for the April 8th 2024 total solar eclipse! One of those is all about viewing the overall eclipse: building a "Solar Funnel" or "Sun Funnel". 

Our old telescope,  a Parks 60mm refractor we bought about 30 years ago, happens to be on an equatorial mount and has a sidereal motor. All that means is that I can point it at something in the sky and the motor ensures that the object remains in the eyepiece (with only an occasional need to adjust the direction the telescope is aimed). 

Normally, we would never point a telescope at the Sun without a solar filter but in this case it is OK: we won't be looking directly into the eyepiece. Instead what would appear in the eyepiece is projected onto a piece of rear-projection screen material, allowing us to see it safely. Better yet, more than one person can watch at the same time!

We have used a similar approach in the past, projecting the Sun onto a white piece of poster board to check out sunspots but that was kind of cumbersome. This Sun Funnel design is much easier to use. 

Ironically, while the Sun Funnel does a great job of showing the solar disk including sunspots and the Moon taking a bigger and bigger "bite" out of the Sun during the partial phase of an eclipse, it won't be something we'll pay any attention to during the "Big Show"; it will be useless during totality since the Sun will have disappeared behind the Moon!

Still, the partial phase of the eclipse lasts hours compared to totality which only lasts minutes so the Sun Funnel will get a lot of use on the 8th. 

If you have a small telescope (even if it doesn't have a motorized mount) and you'd like to build your own Sun Funnel, they are pretty simple to make and don't cost much, either. One of the most commonly referenced sets of instructions is this one from American Astronomical Society, Nightwise.org and NASA:

BUILD A SUN FUNNEL

It has full instructions on building it, how to use it and details like the calculations for how to determine the right size eyepiece for using a Sun Funnel on your telescope. 

I finished ours the other day but today was the first time the Sun was out long enough for me to test it. If you look closely at the second picture (click on it to see enlarged), you'll see that the bright circle in the middle is the Sun, pretty much filling the entire field of view. You'll also see a number of sunspots, several just above center and another one down at the bottom.

Whether you build your own Sun Funnel or not, I hope you will be someplace in the path of the eclipse on April 8th and wish us all "clear skies"!

Countdown to the April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse!

It's just a month away! Actually, as of the time of this post, the next total solar eclipse visible from North America is 30 days 10 hours and 43 minutes away!

Although we had to travel to see the Great American Eclipse in 2017 - the first and only total eclipse I have seen so far - this time the eclipse is coming to us. In fact, we could just step outside in our back yard in East Dallas and enjoy almost 4 minutes of totality. However, we have family a little south of here who live closer to the centerline and will get 4 minutes and 16 seconds of totality so our plan is to spend the day with family enjoying the view. As long as the weather cooperates, of course!

The last time, I was hoping to capture images with a long lens and also a wide angle time lapse. See link above for posts about that experience but unfortunately I had to skip taking pictures to still be able to see the eclipse with my own eyes (something everyone needs to see at least once in their lives). I did get the wide angle time lapse with a glimpse of totality through the clouds but the real treat was seeing it. 

This time I hope to both see totality as well as capture the experience through many other means. The primary goal is to capture the full eclipse, start to finish, through our small telescope, shooting with a solar filters for most of the eclipse and removing it only for those few minutes where the Moon has fully eclipsed the Sun. 

The list of other ways I plan to capture the eclipse isn't final and I am sure I'll have to give up on some of my plans but right now, in addition to the telescopic images, my tentative plans include:

• a wide angle time lapse of the eclipse from beginning to end with our son's family chicken coop in the foreground
• a long-exposure shot on film with a Brownie camera (a family heirloom) outfitted with a pinhole lens
• the family being able to view the sun, sunspots and eclipse through a solar funnel attached to our other small telescope
• video of shadow bands on a white sheet
• aerial video captured with a drone of the lunar umbra moving across the landscape 
• data collection before, during and after the eclipse using a variety of home made digital sensors based on a low-cost microprocessor called an ESP32, collecting information on the environment (temperature, humidity, pressure), sound levels, light levels and light color spectrum 

Stay tuned for more updates on my progress getting all this ready to go!

Experimenting with AI

Over the course of my career in technology, I gained an appreciation of the use of 'accelerators' — utilities, tools, and techniques that help get a task done more quickly than doing the same task by hand. Although I am retired now, I have various personal projects that involve some form of coding so accelerators are still useful. A new option that has really been a game-changer is ChatGPT. By describing the logic I need, it can sometimes provide complete, working code. At worst, it offers a foundation I can adapt, significantly cutting down the time it takes to create a new script or automation, especially in languages that I didn't use professionally like Python.

With the integration Microsoft has provided between ChatGPT 4 and DALL-E 3 under the covers of Copilot (previously Bing Chat), I decided to try my hand using it as an accelerator for creating images. For a few years now, I've had the idea of having a blog title image that highlighted the various interests I write about on this blog, primarily astronomy, photography and sailing: a nighttime seascape with a sailboat and the Milky Way arching overhead. As I have never received a response to my post seeking help from an artist, I decided to experiment with Copilot to create the image myself.

One thing I learned along the way is that creating with ChatGPT and DALL-E isn't like painting with a tool like Photoshop... there are limits to the degree of control you have. My original intent was to have the horizon centered in the image with a pretty plain foreground and limited detail at the top so that I could crop the standard DALL-E square image down to a landscape orientation. The initial images often placed the horizon lower or higher than specified, and revising the prompt didn't always affect its position in the final image. Similarly, I originally had specified having a single-masted sailboat yet every image generated had a two or three-masted ship. Anyway, it appears you have flexible about the details of the generated image.

After numerous passes, I started from scratch with the following prompt which didn't include a reference to a sailboat.

Create a photo-realistic image of a night-time  seascape with a calm sea with a large foreground of water and no land visible, with the stars across the sky an do the Milky Way rising high the the sky on the right side of the image, a low line of clouds along the horizon with a few small lightning bolts in the far distance and a full moon just above the horizon on the far left side of the image.

Of the 4 images generated, I chose the one that was closest to what I had in mind and provided a second prompt to add a small sailboat off in the distance, along the horizon. Here is the result.

This image came close to matching my original vision. The unexpected rocks under the water in the foreground were easily cropped out, although I left a few visible in the final version. Similarly, the Moon was up high instead of on the horizon but, again, not something I minded cropping out. Although the sailboat was a bit smaller than I'd like, I think it works well.

The one issue with this version is the reflection on the water in the middle. It's obviously not the Moon as that's at top right but it's not clear what it is a reflection of. The brightness on the horizon looks a bit like a sunset so perhaps it is supposed to be the Sun behind the clouds. I decided that I'm fine with the sky brightness but the reflection had to go.

Picking the image in Copilot opened it in Image Creator where I could pick Customize which opened the image in Microsoft Designer, an AI-powered design app. One of its features is 'generative erase'. Basically, all I had to do was select the reflection on the water with a brush and Designer replaced it by filling in that space with something that looked like everything around it. This is similar to the 'generative fill' feature in Photoshop. As you can see, it worked pretty well.

If you read the post linked above, you'll see that my ultimate goal was to have an image like this animated as a GIF. My research suggests that using existing AI tools for this is feasible, but it's not as straightforward as just giving ChatGPT a prompt. It involves creating and compiling a series of images, then employing tools like Stable Diffusion to convert them into a video, which can subsequently be saved as a GIF. It sounds like that could even involve writing code. Eventually, I may give that a try but, for now, I'm satisfied with just cropping this image down and using it as the blog title image for a while.

Your thoughts? Whether you love AI, hate it or are ambivalent, I'd like to hear about it in the comments.

As always, just click on an image to see it full screen!