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/

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. 

July Waning Gibbous Moon

As a follow-up to the supermoon shot in my previous post, last night I spent time fine-tuning my technique for shooting the moon with the equipment I described in that post. Here is the result. 

The main difference is that for this shot I added a 2X teleconverter to increase the focal length. A longer focal length results in higher resolution for the subject, in this case, the Moon passing from full phase to gibbous phase. 

The Evostar 72ED has a focal length of 420mm. It's necessary to use the 85% focal reducer/corrector to capture images through it with a camera so that reduces the effective focal length to 357mm; that was what I used for the image in the prior post. Adding the 2X teleconverter increases the effective focal length to 714mm. The resulting higher resolution provides greater detail in this image. 

This photo is the result of stacking the 3 best of 12 shots using PlanetarySystemStacker. I then followed this tutorial to post-process the image in Lightroom Classic. While some of the improvement over the last image is due to the post-processing, I think that overall this is a much better shot thanks to using the teleconverter and spending more time getting as sharp focus as possible. 

Enjoy!

July 2022 Supermoon

As reported on EarthSky and other sites, the full moon yesterday was the closest and brightest of 2022, fitting the definition of what is now commonly referred to as a supermoon. It was cloudy to the east when I went out to the north shore of White Rock Lake to capture it rising over Corinthian Sailing Club so initially it wasn't visible but it eventually started peaking out of the clouds, appearing very orange. Here is the shot I captured with a Nikon D750 attached to our Evostar 72ED telescope and 85% focal reducer/corrector mounted on our Sky Watcher Star Adventurer tracker. This is the result of processing 150 shots, first cropped and exposure adjusted with Lightroom Classic and then stacked with PlanetarySystemStacker to get a cleaner, sharper image.

This is a pretty crude result as I am still learning how to get optimal focus with the camera on this telescope, how to balance the tracker to improve stability and how to use the stacking software. More to come...

While I was shooting this, I had another camera taking shots for a timelapse video of the supermoon rising over the sailing club and the lake. I'll post that after I have time to work on editing and rendering it. 

Click on the image to view full screen. Enjoy!