Quote:
Originally Posted by AstralTraveller
True, but if your fov is say 2 degrees and the ship rolls 5 degrees you won't keep the sun in the frame.
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Look, just to set the record straight, shipboard eclipse photography is a routine thing, not something that happened once on the Black Sea. As in all photography, you shoot to the conditions so you're probably not going to shoot a 2-deg field if degree of difficulty worries you. As far as a 5-deg roll goes, if you get that in a modern ship of any decent size then you're more likely to be going for the barf bag than watching the eclipse! Pitch is more likely to be a problem than roll, but the worst is if the ship is not steering a straight course, eek. And there's no need to limit yourself to a tripod, shoot handheld if necessary.
I was lucky enough to be shipboard for the 2010 TSE (my only TSE so far) and got shots I was really happy with (and David Malin was too, in 2011
). I shot conservatively at 200mm (about 6.5-deg frame width?) and over 4 mins only made one slight adjustment to the framing. The eclipsed Sun moved about frame-to-frame but never got near the edges. Seas were fairly light but not perfect, and it was a cargo/passenger ship, tiny compared to cruise liners like the Oosterdam.
Not only that, there were heaps of photographers on board, many of them very experienced with a number of eclipse cruises behind them. They put up a slideshow of shots taken that day by various people and it was a sight to behold, blew my meagre offerings away. Some really detailed proms, Bailey's Beads, Diamond Rings, all sorts of scales & features, amazing shots. But no shots of the finer details of the solar corona, you'd need a millpond and no engine vibration for that.
That said, a few precious minutes is too short to be mucking around with a camera too much. Just enjoy the experience!
Cheers -