Today's solar eclipse
Here are some images I took of the solar eclipse that just occurred:
The first image is simply the Sun and sky without any filters on the camera. As you can see, the image is far too bright to see that there is actually a small chunk missing from the Sun. I'm happy that it didn't damage my camera with the intense light!
For the next image, I placed a welding lens with a shade of #10 in front of the camera lens. It turned the image a shade of green, but did manage to filter out some brightness, but still not enough. You can see lots of lens flare in this image.
Still using only a single welding lens, I zoomed in closer to the Sun and at this point there was less than half of the Sun visible, but it was still too bright for the camera.
For this next image, I stacked 2 welding lenses in front of the camera lens and that made a huge difference! By this time the eclipse was approaching the maximum that we would see from Vancouver, Canada.
At approximately 90% covered (the most we would see from here) the air was a lot cooler (or at least we didn't feel like we were baking in the hot Sun any more), but it was still very much daylight and there were still strong shadows on the ground (I expected it would be darker, almost like twilight, but it was more like a day with high thin cloud instead). For this image I used only one welding lens and it seemed sufficient with the reduced visible area of the Sun. It is interesting how the Moon seems to have slipped under the Sun.
As the Moon progressed and came out the other side, I switched back to using 2 welding lenses to get the following image.
Still using 2 welding lenses, this is the last of my pictures as the Moon transited in front of the Sun.
I hope you enjoyed my pictures. I had fun taking them. I invited a bunch of neighbours and one brought visitors from New Zealand , so we had an eclipse party in my driveway. I also made a pin-hole camera for observing the progress of the eclipse and we took turns looking through the various devices I made available to everyone.
Thank-you for visiting my page!
Fabulous!! The crescent images are so sharp... and you know the green effect makes the pictures look otherworldly. Like you're taking pictures of an alien visitation or something!
Thank-you. For some unknown reason Steemit is NOT showing all the images.
IMG_2190.JPG is missing from the original post.
Every letter I type either toggles the image in this reply on or off. How truly bizzare! I and a few others have noticed that images go missing from older posts. Time for the dev's. to dig into this crazy phenomenon before mass adoption of the platform! I also need to leave out one of the two parenthesis in order for the image to display here.
EDIT: After clicking the POST button, the image that was seen in the preview did NOT appear in the reply.
2nd edit: Let's see if putting the parenthesis back in makes a difference.
Wow... those are some really unique shots of the eclipse! Using welding lenses is a really great idea... never thought of that!
Thanks. I'm always looking for ways to re-purpose stuff.
Here are the cardboard holders I made to hold the welding lenses:
And this is the pinhole camera (from inside) for watching the image of the Sun safely:
And the outside of the pinhole camera showing the cut-out of cardboard so I could pop a tiny round hole into the aluminum foil.
The image is projected (inverted) on the smaller back side of the box. The bottom of the box is held so it shades the image (bottom up facing the Sun) and we look from under the inside of the box.
I watched a video from NASA last night regarding the eclipse and was really shocked that with all their special equipment, the pictures they posted were very similar to mine! Their colour was a bit different, but what we could see in the image was pretty darn close! I guess when using such a strong filter, there is only so much detail one can see. For anyone in the path of totality, they could remove the heavy filter once in totality and get clearer images and are able to see the corona. Unfortunately we were not that lucky.
Nice shots ! There wasn't much to see in my location because of cloud cover.
Thanks. I suspect that cloud cover is also the reason that this is the FIRST time in my life I got to witness such an event. I'm sorry you couldn't see it in real life. It's always a little different to see it with your own eyes directly. My lenses are actually too weak (NASA says you need shade 12 or 13 to look directly at the Sun), but by stacking 2 lenses together, hopefully our eyes were protected enough. I advised everyone NOT to look at the Sun for more than a few seconds even with 2 lenses, just in case. We used the pin-hole camera to see more of the progression and of course looking into the digital camera's electronic viewfinder is also safe.