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Post by Jon on Aug 6, 2017 10:28:14 GMT -5
The last solar eclipse (summer of '94 or '95) had me in front of my office building (Northeastern Illinois) with two cameras.
To take photos of the eclipse takes some preparations. The most important thing to remember is to NEVER, EVER look directly at the sun or eclipse. You WILL damage your eyes!
I had mounted two Nikon F2's on a double camera mount on a heavy tripod. One camera had a 300mm lens, the other a 500mm reflex lens. The F2 is has a removable pentaprism which also contains the meterhead. So, off with their heads! I also had rigged a sheet of white cardboard to view the eclipse. The missing metered allowed the ground glass image to be projected on the cardboard. Adding some neutral density filers made the sunlight dimmer, but was still dangerous to vision. Any viewing of the eclipse was made via the projected image!
As this was around lunchtime, I had a crowd following the totality (IIRC around 60%) while I manually reset the cameras to follow. Another fellow pulled his sextant from his car (had a 35' sailboat on Lake Michigan) to follow along and enjoy the show.
Interesting day.
The camera companies should have information to photograph the eclipse. Note using a digital camera is different than a film camera. The image sensor may be damaged or completed ruined by the extreme sunlight.
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Post by Jim Scott on Aug 6, 2017 11:24:59 GMT -5
Just a reminder that the camera in a cell phone or tablet is a digital camera. Pass this along.
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Post by K Pelle on Aug 6, 2017 16:18:41 GMT -5
Well on August 21, providing it isn't raining and the smoke from the fires on the mainland has cleared up, I plan on watching the eclipse from my backyard - actually from the visitors parking lot outside my apartment. All I'll need is my #14 welding goggles and a lawn chair and I'll be able to see the eclipse reach 90% totality sometime between 9:30 and 10:15 AM.
I plan to go to a little more trouble on the night of Aug. 12th though - that's the night I hear the Perseid Meteor shower will be it's best, but I'll have to drive well out of town to lose the sky glow. Again it's dependent on the weather and the smoke clouds, but I have hopes of seeing what is expected to be quite a good display this year.
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Post by K Pelle on Aug 6, 2017 16:24:48 GMT -5
Aw dang - I just checked the calendar and the Moon will be about 3/4 full on the night of the 12th, so all I'd see would be the very brightest meteors - hardly worth the effort of a twenty mile drive and several hours of lost sleep.
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Post by Big Al on Aug 7, 2017 10:52:49 GMT -5
Just a reminder that the camera in a cell phone or tablet is a digital camera. Pass this along. I bought an extra pair of eclipse glasses and plan to pull out the dark lens and tape it over my cell phone camera. I will test it away from the sun before deciding to use on eclipse. There are mounts sold for DSLR's but this is for my memories and not commercial so I didn't buy one. DSLR stays in camera case.
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Post by Jim Scott on Aug 8, 2017 7:26:56 GMT -5
A correction of a previous message. Apple has said that you can use a cell phone, tablet, GoPro, etc. digital camera to shoot a shot of the sun at any time including an eclipse as long as you don’t use a high zoom lenses to make the sun a large part of the picture. They did caution against using a DSLR camera with a lenses with high zoom without special filters or other protection.
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Post by Boyd Percy on Aug 8, 2017 14:23:12 GMT -5
I guess I may get to see the total solar eclipse after all. My wife has a friend who lives in Athens, Tennessee which is in the path of totality and not too far from the center line. She has invited us to visit several times in the past so we hope to take up her generous offer.
By the way, in the book, Redeye, the hero, Steve Taylor makes a trip to Cookevile early in story to fleece a crook by selling a piece of property at an inflated price. I believe that Cookeville which is east of Nasville along I-40 is near the path of totality though Sparta or Crossville to the south would be better locations to view the total solar eclipse.
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Post by Wes on Aug 10, 2017 9:45:02 GMT -5
Part of a column from the paper:
The exposed part of sun will be just as bright as always, so you should not look directly at the sun without some kind of eye protection. Solar-safe glasses are the best bet and they are cheap, but it's probably too late to order them. But there are a couple other little-known things you can do to view the eclipse safely if you don't have the solar-safe glasses.
The first sounds crazy but works beautifully -- I know since I did it at the last eclipse I went to over twenty years ago. Get a hand mirror -- the kind women use to check their makeup works great -- and the shape of the mirror doesn't matter. Stand in the sun and reflect the image onto a nearby surface, like a building, preferably something that's fairly blank. When I did this at the last eclipse, I used a garage about a hundred yards away. This means, of course, that a lot of people can look at the reflected image at the same time. You don't want to hurt someone, so be careful where you point the reflected image since looking at the mirror will be almost as bright as looking directly at the sun. You might want to try this out before the eclipse just so you understand what you're doing.
The other way I'm talking about is not quite as effective but works pretty well. Get a couple sheets of cardboard about the size of a normal sheet of paper. Poke a small hole in the center of one of them. Hold that toward the sun and let the light showing through the hole fall on the other sheet of cardboard. How large should the hole be? That's up to you. A larger hole will give you a larger but less distinct image, while a smaller one will be dimmer but sharper. You might want to try several different sizes, but the edges of the hole should be as smooth as possible. Again, try it out beforehand to work out the details. If you are around a tree during the eclipse, you may see many little eclipse images on the ground from light shining through the tree.
Take the time during the eclipse to see some of the changes around you,. It will get darker here, but not totally dark. Birds may shut down their activity since they will think it's evening. The temperature probably will drop.
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Post by Boyd Percy on Aug 10, 2017 12:39:49 GMT -5
I understand that you can use exposed film negatives as a shield to view the solar eclipse. I don't know if this is true and wouldn't suggest using it before I checked it out.
There is another total solar eclipse in 2024 passing through Mexico, the USA and Canada. I understand that its path will cross Dallas, Little Rock, parts of the Midwest including Indianapolis, Toledo, Cleveland and western Pennsylvania and finally out through Newfoundland into the Atlantic.
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Post by Wes on Aug 10, 2017 21:14:19 GMT -5
I was going to reply and say that I wouldn't know where to find exposed film negatives any more since I haven't shot a frame of real film since 2003. Then I got to thinking about it, and found a box on the top shelf in my office to discover that it contained several pairs of solar glasses and quite a bit of exposed film negatives. The box may have been sitting there closed for over twenty years! I guess that sometimes it pays off to not be very good about throwing things away.
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Post by K Pelle on Aug 11, 2017 14:41:39 GMT -5
Well, I'm slightly jealous, but I still wish you a good trip and good weather for viewing, By the way, here's a link to a picture that illustrates what the sun looks like at sunset to many folks here in BC: www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/listeners-lens-1.3302734 It's not that bad around the Victoria/Esquimalt area, but just shortly before sunset, the sun does appear as little more than a red disc.
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Post by Leo Kerr on Aug 13, 2017 13:18:36 GMT -5
on the use of exposed film-negatives, I would not even think about it unless it were conventional black-and-white negative film. The other films end up with not-super-opaque dyes; black-and-white negative film is metallic silver (oxide?).
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Post by Bonno Bloksma on Aug 14, 2017 8:50:29 GMT -5
For those of us old enough to have CDs ;-) If you put 2 CDs on top of each other you can look through the 2 CDs and that should filter enough light to protect your eyes. I remember doing that in the 90's when we had a near full eclipse near where I worked. If you are not sure 2 CDs might be enough then start with 3 and if it gets to dark go back to 2. Look through the CD itself, not the hole in the middle ;-)
If you have polaroid sunglasses you can use 2 and hold them at a 90 degree angle, That should filter ALL the light. Now rotate slightly back to maybe 87 degrees and watch as the sun becomes visible. However, I dot recommend this for the simple reason it is too easy to accidentally rotate too far and have too much light go through. :-(
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Post by Leo Kerr on Aug 16, 2017 20:20:04 GMT -5
something that comes to mind with reference to the CDs - a CD-R is going to have a very different, and I suspect much thinner light absorption profile than a professionally/mass-produced stamped disc. But yeah, there are countless ways to do this, some are even safe. But it isn't worth hurting your eyes over!
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Post by Leo Kerr on Aug 21, 2017 13:49:43 GMT -5
Bonno,
turns out the CDs work surprisingly well. Caveats being, at least with the CD-Rs I was using, the "silver" part on the label side, as opposed to the writable "frosty" part. Some of the CDs I had had a large enough area to stack, registered, and get a pretty clean image. Thanks; I doubt I'd have even thought of CDs.
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