Solar (eclipse) Photography

Was pretty good here in Oxford.

A friend who works next door brought his telescope to work and I had a solar filter on my camera. Loads of people came to look at the gear and see the pictures we had. We gladly obliged and let them see it in safety on the live screen of the camera or with the special glasses we had.

I ended up with a nice series.

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There was a little sunspot to the top left.
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which was gradually eaten!
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And then looked a bit like an eye on a big pacman looking to eat something in return :)

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I just took my DSLT (Sony A77) in to work just in case, but had no filters so wasn't going to use it, however a couple of the guys had kindly brought in some welders glass, but trying that held on to the lens just had too many internal reflections and it looked rubbish, then I noticed someone holding the glass out at arms length, and realised that worked much better..

I only have my 16-50f/2.8 on the camera, but it was good enough for a quick snap..
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Then the clouds got slightly worse, but I found I could stop the camera down and take a couple of brief shots with no filter. The camera has an EVF, so I wasn't worried about damaging my eyes, and would risk the sensor..

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But I'm in awe of the proper telecoped stuff in this thread.. damn amazing..
 
I managed catch it on the way into work, but just had a Oneplus One phone on me which don't have the best sensor. Then even under exposing as much as possible with a 1/8500th shutter speed the eclipse still clipped. Although as shown here I accidentally caught some water & a bird with a twig in its beak lol.
At ISO 100 theres still grain though, that darn Sony sensor!

Same pic zoomed in below & can just see a small eclipse produced by lens reflections.

2cgndpj.jpg


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Drift capture of the sun using the borrowed SolarMax yesterday.. aligned and stacked all the 674 images.. a little sharpening and stretch..

integration_clone_deconv_stretch

The scope originally cost something like $15K ... a double stacked hydrogen alpha scope giving a tuneable 0.3 Angstroms. So 10 angstroms to a 1 nm wavelength..

The little dots in the centre are a solar flare :) (little one) and the filaments are the loops of plasma travelling over the magnetic line fields - they appear as prominences on the edge of the disk but this scope's 0.3A bandpass means it can distinguish between the surface and prom contrast!
 
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juno_first said:
I managed catch it on the way into work, but just had a Oneplus One phone on me which don't have the best sensor. Then even under exposing as much as possible with a 1/8500th shutter speed the eclipse still clipped. Although as shown here I accidentally caught some water & a bird with a twig in its beak lol.
At ISO 100 theres still grain though, that darn Sony sensor!

Same pic zoomed in below & can just see a small eclipse produced by lens reflections.

2cgndpj.jpg


ws3azq.jpg
Click to expand...

Eerie. Nearly bordering on something from Donnie Darko.
 
I thought it would have been too cloudy and didn't expect to catch much so I left my DSLR, tripod and lenses in the house and nipped down to North Queensferry with nothing more than my Samsung NX CSC thinking it'll be quiet. I arrived to find at least two dozen other photographers there all fully kitted up and me feeling really unprepared:



I did managed to get this shot too:

 
ajf said:
Do you think this is as good as I am likely to get with current camera setup?

I might start looking a bit more into this. I do have an older TAL Refractor telescope which I assume could be converted with the necessary filters. I just need to blow the dust off!

Couple of general sun questions. I notice some of the photos posted by you and others show quite a few sunspots. Is this down to the high magnification used for the image or just due to the rotation and sunspot activity?
Click to expand...

On a 200mm lens you'll get the larger sun spots. This is down to a couple of things:
a. focal length gives you the opportunity to see the smaller spots
b. Sunspots will appear when you have the correct focus and the correct exposure time. Often I will see a sunspot but will have to play with the exposure times to get the best image
c. slower exposure time means more solar and earth atmosphere churn - often people use a camera at 60fps to capture 5 minutes of video, then use a program to grade the images for quality - rejecting all but the top frames with 90-98% quality. A program such as Registax then allows the images to be stacked by warping the image so they match.
d. aperture size directly affects maximum resolution.
e. lastly - sunspots, filaments and granulation are all dynamic features on the sun. Granulations change over a 15 minute period.. the same with the plasma loops and the details within the spots themselves.

If you're using the TAL.. (a regular Ha solar scope donor and well regarded achromatic planetary scope too!) then you may need a telescope mount to track the target as the earth rotates. It's focal length is something like 1000mm (f10). So you'll get nicely zoomed in - where you'll need to take lots of images (see point c above).
 
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