Total Solar Eclipse Video Sequence - April 8, 2024
| Object | Total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 sequence | |
| Telescope (Photo) | N/A | |
| Telescope (Guiding) | N/A | |
| Camera (Photo) | Canon 60Da with Canon 70-200 zoom lens at 200mm, and Canon 60D with Sigma 150-600mm lens at 600mm (totality) | |
| Camera (Guiding) | N/A | |
| Exposure Detail | Video created from more than 160 individual frames | |
| Location | Cape Girardeau, Missouri (N37.2991, W89.5840) | |
| Date | 04/08/2024 | |
| Note | Taken from Cape Girardeau, Missouri. This video, at just over a minute in length, covers the entire duration of the eclipse. This represents over 160 separate shots over the roughly 2.5 hours that the moon was moving in front of and then away from the sun. The frames representing totality were taken by one of my traveling companions, Dana Willis, who was gracious enough to donate his totality shots for this video. At the start of totality and again at the end of totality, Dana captured the "Diamond Ring" effect. Because Dana and I used very different lenses, I had to down-scale and rotate his shots to get them to fit into my this sequence without looking horribly different. While we used identical cameras, I used a 200mm lens and he used a 600mm lens. I also had to align all of the individual frames, both his and mine, so that the video wouldn't jump around, even though we both had camera mounts that tracked pretty well that day. It was a bit breezy so the image jumped around a fair bit, and neither mount tracked perfectly for the entire 2.5 hours, hence the alignment step. Finally, I had to speed the entire thing up since the original video when assembled lasted over 10 minutes. |