Solar Eclipse

Lots of people all showing the same half-dozen videos, but Japan was clouded/blizzarded out and only the Californians seem to have got a decent picture. I suppose you need some pretty fancy gadgets to get the best shots.

Originally posted by Kewpie
Lots of people all showing the same half-dozen videos, but Japan was clouded/blizzarded out and only the Californians seem to have got a decent picture. I suppose you need some pretty fancy gadgets to get the best shots.

Not really.

Solar eclipses are one of those events that really lend themselves to amateur photography.

You can get some really good results with fairly basic kit.

The sun/moon are big and bright so photographing them doesn't need a big telescope, and
often large telescopes can focus in on too small a patch of sky to get the whole picture.

As long as you have a decent camera, and have a reliable solar filter you can use to stop you
burning through your CCD (or eye), the main thing you need to get good pictures is a clear
spell of weather and an artistic eye for setting up the shot.


You can get solar filter gear for cameras of different kinds pretty cheaply, although this is
something you don't want to skimp on quality for, it's still not a break the bank item.

Saw it here of course I'm in Nor Cal. It became fairly dark out and I took pictures of shadows on the walls were you could see odd circles. A guy I work with took photos with his telescope and of course he has special filters. I also built a shoe box pin hole camera and it worked well. hardest thing was to line it up correctly with the sun.


Manny

We got some good stuff here in LA. The light spots coming from between the leaves were all crescents. A pinhole camera worked and some guy set up a telescope with a pinhole camera arrangement and got a really big crescent image. Video camera got some interesting images too.