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!

October 14th, 2023 Annular Eclipse Timelapse

 

Unable to make it to a spot on the path of the annular eclipse today to view the Ring of Fire, I captured this timelapse of the partial eclipse view from my backyard. 

What's great about successfully capturing this eclipse that I wasn't even home! Since our granddaughter Harper was showing her rabbit at the State Fair of Texas stock show today, I had the equipment set up to run automatically. Months of preparation and practice paid off! BTW, more to come on the State Fair....

The shadows on the first few seconds are power lines which appear to move across the face of the Sun but it's the Sun's apparent motion across the sky, tracked by the telescope/camera, that accounts for the motion. 

This view was captured with a special solar filter, a Baader solar film filter. Without it, pointing my telescope and camera at the Sun would have damaged my equipment. 

As we are approaching "solar maximum", the Sun is pretty active so there are plenty of Sunspots across the face of the Sun right now. 

Here's what I used to create this timelapse. I set the internal intervalometer on the D750 to take shots every 30 seconds at 1/1000th shutter speed from just before till just after the eclipse, about 380 shots in all. Just to be sure I didn't have to worry about batteries in the camera and tracker lasting long enough, I ran everything off an external power pack stored under the tripod. You can see the equipment in action in my post on eclipse preparations. 

Equipment

Sky Watcher EvoStar 72ED Refractor

Sky Watcher 0.85 Flattener/Reducer

Sigma 2X Teleconverter

DeepSkyDad AF3 Autofocuser

Baader Solar Film Filter

Nikon D750 DSLR

Sky Watcher Star Adventurer 2 Tracker

Radian Carbon Fiber Tripod

Processed on Mac OS with 

Adobe Lightroom Classic

LRTimelapse

DaVinci Resolve

Music

"Eclipse"

by 1st Contact

Shared under Creative Commons License

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/1st-contact/single/eclipse/

Bedroom Camera Obscura Timelapse

Building on the project described in my last post which involved creating a camera obscura out of a bedroom with our grandkids Olivia and Jack, we have taken the project to the next level: video!

For this, we used Olivia's pinhole lens which with its larger aperture allowed shooting shorter exposures. That let us maximize how many frames we could capture in a given amount of time. I re-framed the view in my Nikon D750 to take advantage of the wall space on the right and we then set it up to take one ten-second shot every 12 seconds. At the end of an hour and 10 minutes, I stopped the camera, having taken 348 images. 

The next step was loading the images on the computer, cropping to a 16:9 ratio and adjusting the exposure a little in Lightroom plus inverting them vertically, then using LRTimelapse to render a 4K video. The last step was adding titles and music (Pounded Piano by Podington Bear) in Da Vinci Resolve. 

This was shot at a busy time in the backyard, with our Weimaraner Luna coming and going and with the grass being  mowed. The timelapse also captures clouds floating by and the shadows of trees and such moving. 

This is short but pretty cool... Enjoy! 

Best viewed full-screen. 

Chasing the Strawberry Moon Over Downtown Dallas - Remix

This is a remix of previously posted video of the 2023 Strawberry Moon, this time including a cropped view that better highlights the Strawberry Moon rising through the clouds behind Reunion Tower.

Watch full-screen for best view. 

Chasing the Strawberry Moon Over Dallas

Although the clouds interfered with getting a clean telephoto image of the full Strawberry Moon of 2023 above Reunion Tower in Dallas (my original goal), I was still able to capture this sequence of it through the clouds as it rose over downtown just after sunset on June 3rd. 

This is 34 minutes compressed into about 12 seconds. Watch center-frame and you'll see the moon just peak through the clouds and then pop in and out through to the end, tracing an arch up and above Reunion Tower.

Timlapse sequence captured with a Nikon D750 and Nikkor 24-120 lens at 40mm, shot from Trammel Crow Park on the Trinity River. Processed with Lightroom Classic, LRTimeLapse and Da Vinci Resolve.

See my shot of the Strawberry Moon over downtown last year here.

Music is Time's Up by Loopop, YouTube Media Library.

Watch full-screen to get the full effect.