Solar eclipse – Animation from Brisbane

[Dennis]

After much lengthy and at times tedious processing, I am delighted (and relieved!) to present an animated view of November’s total solar eclipse as recorded from Brisbane. The plan was to take a frame every 2 minutes using the EOS Utility running on my Laptop, but a few communication and stability problems thwarted this, so not all the frames are evenly spaced. Towards the end of the eclipse, the PC battery died so I had to plug in a remote release and finish off the last 30 mins manually.

When the rig was running smoothly, I had time to experience the eerie darkness and the noticeable chill as the eclipse approach the 80% maximum, whereupon a flock of some 20-30 Black-winged Stilts took off, presumably heading home to roost, fooled by the unexpected appearance of the unusual twilight.

I was using the Canon Extender EF 2x II which allegedly should not autofocus at F11, so I did not switch the lens to MF but I think that the combination did autofocus, so some of the latter frames are a little soft where presumably the AF tried to latch onto the thin cloud that occasionally drifted across the FOV – I think that the AF confirmation bleep occasionally sounded on certain exposures, but I didn’t want to fiddle with the rig and settings!


In terms of processing, neither Images Plus nor Photoshop could align the individual frames due to their changing geometry aspect, so I had to align them manually in Photoshop, frame-by-frame, pixel-by-pixel (groan) where I only have the use of 3.16GB of RAM on my Win XP box, so I was continuously plagued by crashes and out of memory errors. Hence the long time between original capture and this final result! Must upgrade!

Equipment used:

• Canon 5D Mk III, Canon 400mm F5.6L, Canon Extender EF 2x II, Vixen GP mount.
• 73 frames at 1/2000 sec, F11, ISO100, Full aperture Baader 3.8 Astrophotography Solar Film.
• 14th November 2012, 5:54am – 7:59am AEST (UT+10)
• Brisbane, Qld, Australia.

The Vixen GP mount was polar aligned using a compass for the Azimuth setting and a 360º protractor to set 27.5º for the Altitude setting. This kept the Sun in the frame with only the occasional need to re-centre over the 2 hour period.

The 1st frame remains static for 5 secs to provide equipment details.
WARNING: 5MB file:
Here is the link:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25149831/Sol...mation-600.gif


Cheers

Dennis

[sheeny (Al)]

Very nice Dennis, despite the problems. Thanks for persevering with it!

Al.

[h0ughy (David)]

how good is that!!

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

A lot of work went into that animation. Thanks for posting. The exposure has been handled really well. I am yet to edit my sequence of stills from Redcliffe. When I do, it might be worth trying what have done.

[Matt Wastell (Matt)]

Hi Dennis - thanks for all the hard work - it has come out a treat! Congratulations aon a super record of the ' Brisbane' event!

[jjjnettie (Jeanette)]

Thanks for taking the effort to put this together. I was keen to see how it looked from Brissie.

[Jen]

Wow that's so cool thank Dennis

[Dennis]

Thank you Al, David, Stu, Matt, Jeanette & Jen, I appreciate you looking at, and commenting on, the animation – I probably made it sound more painful than it really was!

I did most of the processing in CS6 but had to use CS5 for the final animation as it seems that the “Animation” capability disappeared between CS5 and CS6?

The main processing challenge was that CS5/CS6 kept running out of memory with the larger 5D Mk III files, so I had to open small batches to manually align, crop and re-size to reduce the file size.

Once that was achieved, I recorded an Action to apply a couple of the Topaz Labs plug-ins (Micro Contrast Enhancement & Photo Pop) and saved the output to a new folder. I then used the onOne PhotoTools 2.6 plug in to produce the more natural looking yellow colour (Auto Tone & Colour) compared to the cooler white of the Baader solar film. Thankfully, this was done in Batch mode whilst I made myself a refreshing cup of Earl Grey tea...

Finally, I generated the animation in CS5 but when saving for web as an animated gif, I kept encountering the dreaded out-of-memory error message problems, but then, magically, during one session immediately after a re-boot, it just worked.

I see a new Win 7 box with 32GB of RAM and an Intel 480 GB SSD in my future!

Cheers

Dennis

[Octane (Humayun)]

Nice one.

Welcome to the Mark III club.

H

[RickS (Rick)]

Great stuff, Dennis! That's very cool.

I can appreciate the work that went into it after spending a lot of time aligning solar images myself!

[firstlight (Tony)]

Very nice work Dennis.

Darryl commented to me that he was quite surprised just how slender the crescent was from Brisbane and how the light had that twilight feel about it.
I have a Win 7 i7 and 8 gb ram and I can't open some files and get the out of memory message. Usually 32 bit tif files from DSS.

Need. More. Memory. But seriously, 5D Mk III and running a XP machine?

Cheers
Tony

[Derek Klepp]

Well done Dennis very smooth

[StephenM (Stephen)]

Great animation Dennis! Very nicely put together.

Cheers,
Stephen

[von Tom (Tom)]

Perfect alignment Dennis! An excellent animation of the eclipse with excellent detail on the disc. Thankyou for putting the time in and posting it.

Cheers,


Tom

[SkyViking (Rolf)]

Excellent work Dennis, the detail is great.
The view is very similar to what I saw from Auckland. It was a great experience - I didn't get any close up shots though.

[iceman (Mike)]

Ooh a Mk 3! Well done Dennis!

Great animation, loved it!

[Paul Haese]

Lovely work Dennis. The way the moon slides past demonstrates the geometry really well. Only 1720km further north it was in perfect alignment.

[Dennis]

Thank you Humayun, Rick, Tony, Derek, Stephen, Tom, Rolf, Mike and Paul, for your lovely comments, they have helped erase the memories of my trials and travails toiling at the PC!

The 5D Mk III is certainly a capable camera and I am enjoying the use of my early Xmas present!

Cheers

Dennis