Partial Solar Eclipse – Collage and 130 frame animation.
Hello,
Well, despite the intermittent clouds in Brisbane and after some lengthy processing, I was finally relieved to see that I had 130 frames covering the partial solar eclipse of 7th February 2008. I recorded event from 2:18pm to 3:36pm AEST, losing several frames within the sequence to clouds.
Here is a collage of some of the individual frames, and an animated gif of the 130 frames from start to finish. The end frames are a little washed out due to shooting through light cloud.
Vixen 102mm F9 refractor, Canon 40D DSLR.
Exposures ranged from 1/1000 to 1/30 sec, depending on the cloud cover. ISO 400.
Thank you everyone for your kind words of encouragement – it certainly was a long journey and I’m thankful that you enjoyed the results!
The original 160 off, 3888 x 2592 pixel exposures at 30 sec intervals from the Canon 40D were approx 10Mb each and of those, 30 were of a blank screen, or should I say clouds, so I discarded those and selected the best 130!
Here are the somewhat tortuous steps I had to take to produce the final movie:
Canon Digital Photo Professional to batch convert the 160 images to 1400x933 pixel TIF files at approx 3.9Mb each.
Corel PhotoPaint to batch convert the white/pink/blue hue of the Baader solar film to a more pleasing yellow by writing a macro to adjust colour saturation and levels of the yellow/orange components. This produced 1400x933 pixel JPGs at approx 0.5Mb each.
ImagesPlus to Align the images and Crop to 800x600 pixels.
ImagesPlus to resize the aligned images to 400x300 pixels, approx 36Kb each.
K3CCDTools to produce the AVI.
Advanced Gif Animator to produce the final animated gif.
Fantastic animation Dennis!
Such a pity about the clouds wasn't it.
I was clouded out 10 minutes before max. then it bucketed down. So I completely missed the last half. You're animation made me feel like I was there, only faster. LOLOL.
Cheers.
Thanks, Dennis, I really enjoyed the animated gif. It ws a kind of innocent litl kiss they had, wasn't it ... nothing very heavy.
in mayfield newcastle a very rare blue sky morning turned into cloud again maybe an hour before first contact. It was raining throughout the eclipse. than just to make us feel worse the sky cleared largely by about 4.30 with lots of views of clear sun.!!
Using Digital Photo Professional, one of the applications bundled with the Canon 40D camera on the CDROM, I was able to batch re-name the files from the eclipse to include the hh-mm-ss time stamp of when the exposure was made.
I then used Adobe Bridge (the functionally rich File explorer with CS3) to select 30 of the photos and automatically generate a “Contact Sheet” using the file name as a label for each “thumbnail” in the “Contact Sheet”.
So, it is with great pleasure that DPP and Adobe presents a time line of Tuesday’s partial eclipse as viewed from Brisbane.
Thanks for the feedback. I tried various fps settings on the AVI out of K3CCDTools and struggled with the settings. The overall sequence contains several single frames showing partial cloud cover and at the higher frame rates, these cloud affected frames seemed to “jump” or “blink” which made the movie appear jerky. I then kept reducing the frame rate until the cloud affected frames transitioned more smoothly. I think at 5 fps the eye could see the clouds as a real image than a “jump” in the transition.
Both ImagesPlus and K3CCDTools handled the centering operation of the solar disc extremely well, given its changing profile frame to frame.
Now if only Gary could have picked me up in his chopper!
You mentioned that K3CCD tools handled the centering operation well. I've never used this program, but did try a crude animation of the 28August lunar eclipse last year using the custom animation feature in Powerpoint. This used about 55 jpg images from memory. However, I wasn't able to easily align the frames.
Would K3CCD tools be able to automatically align these images and make an animated GIF for me? Any advice would be appreciated!
You mentioned that K3CCD tools handled the centering operation well. I've never used this program, but did try a crude animation of the 28August lunar eclipse last year using the custom animation feature in Powerpoint. This used about 55 jpg images from memory. However, I wasn't able to easily align the frames.
Would K3CCD tools be able to automatically align these images and make an animated GIF for me? Any advice would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Stephen
Hi Stephen
Yes – K3CCDTools can align planetary type images that are “jumping around”, or not centred, from Frame to Frame.
Yes – K3CCDTools can output to an animated gif although in the example I produced, it came out around 7Mb compared to Advanced Gif Animator’s 4 Mb.
I note that like me, you are in Brisbane. If you would like a demo of K3CCDTools, PM me and we’ll see if we can tee up a time.
