Eclipse
Started: 2024-04-08 20:38:37
Submitted: 2024-04-08 21:29:21
Visibility: World-readable
Watching this spring's eclipse from Santa Cruz
This spring's solar eclipse ended up at an inconvenient time for my schedule, falling on the first Monday that my kids were supposed to be back in school after their spring break. Instead I made plans to attend the Trinity test site open house, until it was canceled and we ended up going to Los Angeles for a few days (about which, more later). The kids went back to school and I watched the partial eclipse from home.
I stepped out onto my deck a half-hour after the eclipse started in Santa Cruz. The sky was clear and the morning sun was high and bright in the sky. Through eclipse glasses I could see that the sun had a noticeable bite taken out of it; from my perspective the moon was moving from right to left on the lower half of the sun.
For this eclipse I found my camera's tripod mount, so I could actually aim it at the sun and find the right exposure and focus settings, through the neutral density solar filter I bought in advance of the last eclipse, at the end of my 140 mm DX zoom lens. Autofocus and auto-exposure had no idea what to do with the sun; its first attempt ended up with a weird artifact where the sun itself was overexposed (and out of focus), but the obvious lens flare showed a clearly-eclipsed sun.
I put my camera into full-manual mode and managed to focus on the sun (which was awkward, on the little LCD screen on the back of my camera), then stepped back the exposure and aperture until the sun was no longer totally saturated. I ended up with a clear photo of the moon eclipsing part of the sun.
To aim the pictures, I pulled out the LCD screen on my Nikon D5200, and set up the camera in preview mode so it would show a live image on the screen. This basically worked to aim the shot, but the preview was over-exposed, making it more difficult to find the right exposure and focus. To focus I figured out that I should find the point where the fuzzy over-exposed blob of sun was the smallest, which correlated to the sharpest focus in the final image, displayed after I hit the shutter to take the correctly-exposed photo.
While I was waiting for the local maximum, I grabbed a colander from the kitchen to get a pin-hole projection of the sun. The colander's holes were large enough that the effect was somewhat distorted by poor focus, but it kind of worked.
And then the moon crossed the point where it was obscuring 34% of the sun, which was as far as I was going to get in Santa Cruz.
Someday I hope to see a total solar eclipse, but until then I'm pleased that I can see (and photograph) eclipses from my own house.
