Solar Eclipse Challange, Sunday, May 20, HMC-40 Users

[BobDiaz]

Here's the link for more info:

http://www.nature.nps.gov/features/eclipse/wheretoview.cfm

On Sunday, May 20, 2012 there will be a Full Solar Eclipse across the western parts of the US.

As an HMC-40 user, this cries out for a timelapse of the event as the the shadow of the moon covers the Earth. Don't point your HMC-40 at the sun or look at the sun, even during maximum darkness!!! My challenge to other HMC-40 users in the correct area in or near the eclipse area is to shoot a timelapse of the event. I assume that shooting from a high place looking down would give the best view, but it's your call.

Maybe some brave person will make a pinhole camera and shoot a video of the image being projected onto paper.

Figure that at 1 frame per second, 2.5 hours will come out as 6 minutes, 15 seconds of video. One could speed it up in post OR set the camera to 1 frame every 10 seconds and get about 38 seconds of finished video, your choice.

Here's a PDF of a map and times:

http://www.nature.nps.gov/features/eclipse/assets/docs/EclipseBulletin.pdf

If you do shoot a video, please upload to VIMEO or YouTube and post it in this thread.


Thanks,

Bob Diaz

 

[BobDiaz]

All day long, not a cloud in the sky, so as the time approached I drove to the beach to get the shot and the clouds roll in.

No problem, I'll just drive home and shoot there, but the clouds went to the exact spot where the eclipse occurred. No other part of the sky had clouds, go figure. Now I wish I had taken the time to drive inland to Palmdale.

In order to shoot into the sun, I stacked 4 ND filters for a total of 10 stops of ND. As you can see in the video, the internal reflections did show up.

In editing the video (1080/24p) I cut it to 720p footage and set the magnification to 100%. This generated a slight crop into the video and using the motion feature, limited the amount of movement of the sun in the frame.


Bob Diaz