100Feed: How to Safely Photograph Sunday’s Eclipse

On Sunday, May 20, the western half of the United States will be treated to a spectacular annular eclipse as the sun sets in the western sky.
This 4 1/2-minute-long “ring of fire” as the moon blocks the sun will be visible to observers along a narrow track that stretches from Northern California to the Texas Panhandle.

The last time an annular eclipse was widely visible in the United States was May 10, 1994. After Sunday, the next one to be seen in the country won’t occur until Oct. 14, 2023.

If you’re planning to shoot this weekend’s eclipse with a digital camera, particularly a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera, here are a few pointers to increase your chances of success:

1. Use a proper solar filter: Never look at the sun with your naked eyes, or through a telescope, binocular or camera viewfinder without a safe solar filter. Failure to do so can result in serious eye injury or blindness.

Use a No. 14 welder’s glass filter, or purchase special solar filters from companies such as Thousand Oaks, Kendrick Astro Instruments, or Orion Telescopes & Binoculars, and fit them securely in front of your equipment.

2. Use a telescope or telephoto lens with a focal length of 400 millimeters or more: This helps to get detailed, close-up shots of the eclipse. This will give you a reasonably large image of the sun’s disk in the frame.

3. Use a sturdy tripod or mount: Make sure your tripod and head are strong and stable enough to support your camera gear. Keep your setup as portable, light and easy to assemble as possible in case you need to relocate in a hurry to escape clouds.

4. Set the camera to its highest resolution: To record as much detail and color information as possible, use your camera’s highest-quality (least-compressed) JPEG setting or “lossless” (uncompressed) image formats, such as TIFF or RAW.

5. Use a high ISO setting: Set your camera to ISO 400 (or higher) to keep exposures very short and prevent blurring from vibrations.

6. Switch to manual: Set your camera to “manual” (M) so you’ll be able to control its focus as well as exposure and white-balance settings.

7. Focus carefully: Don’t let poor focus ruin your images. If possible, prefocus your camera the night before the eclipse using a bright star.
Otherwise, focus carefully on the sun’s edge (or on sunspots, if some are visible). Place a piece of adhesive tape on your telephoto’s focus ring (or lock the telescope focuser) to keep it from accidentally being moved during the eclipse. Be sure to recheck your focus as the eclipse progresses and refine it if needed.

8. Minimize vibrations: The mirror slap in DSLRs can cause blurred images. If possible, use the camera’s mirror lock-up feature before each shot to keep vibrations to a minimum. You should also operate the shutter with an electronic cable release to eliminate camera shake. Lastly, choose an observing spot that is shielded from the wind.

9. “Bracket” your exposures: It’s a challenge to determine the correct exposure beforehand, so shoot the eclipse at various shutter speeds.
10. Use a fresh battery: DSLRs can easily drain their batteries, especially if you use the LCD screen continuously. Make sure you have a fully charged battery right before the eclipse begins, and have a spare one handy, just in case.

11. Test your imaging setup: Be sure to try out your actual setup before the eclipse. This will reveal any potential problems with focusing and vibrations, as well as internal reflections or vignetting in the optics. Take some test shots of the sun to give you an idea of what exposure to use with your solar filter.

12. Try to shoot the sun in hydrogen-alpha: Unlike “white light,” the plain, visible light from the sun, H-alpha is the red light given off by hydrogen atoms in the sun’s atmosphere. A portable H-alpha telescope offers a wealth of stunning details of the sun at a wavelength of 656.3 nanometers.

13. Process your images: Since the camera’s output is already in digital format, it’s easy to enhance the images’ brightness, contrast, sharpness and color balance using image-editing software such as Adobe Photoshop. You can also “stitch” the frames together to create a movie.
Shooting the Eclipse with Video

As with digital cameras, you need a proper solar filter over your camcorder when recording the sun.

Today’s camcorders have zoom lenses with up to 40x (or more) optical magnification. To videotape the eclipse, simply mount the camcorder on a tripod and zoom in on the filtered sun to the lens’s highest power. (Hand-holding the camcorder can result in shaky footage.) High-end camcorders have manual controls for adjusting the gain, f-stop and shutter speed so you don’t overexpose the sun’s disk.

Again, it is best to test your setup before the eclipse. On the day of the event, be sure to use a fully charged battery and bring a spare one as backup. Take two- to three-second clips every two to five minutes to produce a time-lapse sequence that compresses the eclipse’s hourlong partial phase into just under a minute.

High-end DSLRs are capable of shooting HD video. (Check your camera manual.) In a pinch, you also can use your cell phone camera to shoot video (or still images) through a filtered telescope. Low-cost webcams can also be useful.

Good luck on E-Day!

100Feed: Solar Eclipse on May 20, 2012

When the sun vanishes behind the moon for the first time over the United States in this century, what better place to enjoy the view than from one of the 154 national parks that stand in its path?

Astronomy lovers in the United States will be treated to a partial disappearance of the sun behind the moon this Sunday (May 20). Only the Eastern Seaboard will be totally exempt. The eclipse will occur in the late afternoon or early evening of May 20 throughout North America, and May 21 for observers in Asia.

Over the course of the solar eclipse, the sun won’t vanish completely, but will remain as a ring around the moon for what is known as an annular eclipse. When the eclipse occurs, the moon will be near its most distant point from Earth, making it appear smaller in the sky and thus unable to block the entire sun. But it will still be a stunning sight.

Thirty-three national parks will see the full effect of the moon’s interference. Many western parks will be offering an array of events for their guests, ranging from placing telescopes out for viewing up to a full-scale astronomy festival.

“We’re lucky that so many parks happen to lie within the path of the annular eclipse,” Grand Canyon park ranger Marker Marshall told OurAmazingPlanet.

The Grand Canyon park staff, along with the help of the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association, will be setting up solar telescopes and helping people safely view the eclipse. NASA scientists will be present to talk about the eclipse, as well as recent lunar findings. They will also have eclipse glasses for sale and will demonstrate how to use binoculars to safely set up a projection of the eclipse on a piece of paper. After the eclipse, the park will host a star party.

Marshall noted that, like other national parks, the Grand Canyon boasts signs warning people not to look directly at the sun, or to view the sun through telescopes, binoculars or cameras without a solar filter. Doing so will damage your eyes.

At Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, the annual Astronomy Festival has been moved to coincide with eclipse weekend. Great Basin National Park in Nevada will hold a pre-eclipse party Saturday night with a presentation by an actor playing Galileo, and a special program on Sunday. Several parks will instruct guests on how to make a pinhole viewer of their own to safely observe the eclipse. Several other parks are receiving assistance from their local amateur astronomy clubs to help the public safely watch the show.

Visitors should bring flashlights and jackets, especially if they plan to stay after the eclipse concludes.
“People come to parks to enjoy a dark night sky, and see things like the Milky Way,” Marshall said.
“We can really facilitate people seeing even daytime events,” she added.

But Marshall warns that, while the eclipse will make an interesting image, it won’t necessarily make a great photograph.

Aiming a camera at the eclipse unprotected could damage it. Hopeful photographers need to add a solar filter to their setup, which will wash out the view of the landscape.

“The casual photographer won’t be able to get a photo of the eclipse over the canyon,” she said. Instead, she urges people to enjoy the image captured in their memory.

And there will be plenty of memories made. According to Marshall, all of the campgrounds and hotels around the Grand Canyon that take reservations are booked. Though the first-come, first-serve campgrounds are still available, she anticipates that they, too, will fill quickly, leaving hopeful visitors with a drive of more than an hour to the nearest hotel.

Although only a handful of western parks will receive the full effect of the eclipse, another 125 parks lay along the path of the partial eclipse, where they will provide a stunning view to those not fortunate enough to see the complete show. From Alaska to Minnesota, national parks will catch a partial eclipse or a partial view.

“Astronomy generally is the kind of thing people look for in national parks, so we’re glad to help people celebrate it here,” Marshall said.