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: 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 using DroneLink flightplan

Processed on Mac OS with DaVinci Resolve 

Music

"Eclipse"

by 1st Contact

Shared under Creative Commons License

Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License