I work in software development as I have pretty much all of my adult life. The startup I work for has very flexible policies towards life events, and of course a total eclipse is a major life event. I photographed the eclipse in 1979 when I was still living in Winnipeg (for another 4 months), and this is the first total eclipse I have experienced since then ... a breathtaking 45 years later.
I am not quite dedicated enough to drive hundreds of miles to escape the whispy cloud cover that was predicted, nor to get on the path of actual totality (Ottawa maxed out at 99%). Four or five hours of driving would have netted me the classic images that are associated with totality, but I just can't generate that kind of energy any more lol.
However, I was quite willing to buy a 72mm ND400 filter for my m4/3 Pana Leica 100-400 f4-f6.3 zoom lens and shoot that on my Panasonic G9 Mark 1 on a carbon fiber tripod as you can see here ...
This was a huge problem that I found I could solve only by having the camera and tripod essentially in my lap with one foot under the front leg. Not the most comfortable of positions, but it certainly had no bearing on clarity since the shutter speed was very high for the entire shoot.
Now, the day before was a Sunday, so I went outside in beautiful clear skies (grrr) at about the same time as the eclipse was set to begin and shot a few test images. It took a while to get comfortable with the Neewer ND400 variable neutral density filter, but I eventually got the hang of it and was quite pleased with the result. It was shot at the equivalent of 800mm at f22 I believe. That's a pretty high diffraction aperture, but the result is quite adequate as far as I am concerned.
If you look closely, you can see two sunpots near the top and midway. There is a much fainter spot towards the bottom but at this size it will not really be apparent. I verified that these were sunspots by googling for sun images and found ones with sunspots that look exactly like these. So I am astronomer guy for a day lol.
And then the day arrived ... well, it was only the next day so no great anticipation. I worked starting earlyish in the morning and when my alarm went off, out I went. The whispy cloud was actually less intense most of the time than what you saw in the first image above. And at ND400, the sun pretty much overwhelms the faint cloud cover. However, I did have some trouble getting in focus images at first, so I fiddled with the AF system until I was reliably hitting focus each time. Modern mirrorless cameras have a lot of focus modes :-)
Note: It took me until the sun was a sliver and the AF could no longer reliably hit to finally realize that all I ever had to do was get the sun in focus once and then switch off the AF at the lens. DUH! Considering the distance, there can be no variation at all once the lens is focused at infinity.
The first shot that really looked good was already something like a 10% bite out of the sun. The moon is travelling on an apparent tragectory of perhaps -20 degrees from vertical through the sun and only a hair off-center as you will see. That's a wild-assed guess by the way, so don't hold me to it. These were all shot at ISO 100 with aperture between F14 and F22 and at shutter speeds of 1/8000s, dropping as the sun darkens.
And so I reveal my number one sun. (Well this would actually be my number 2 (hyuk hyuk) sun since I am displaying my first ever sun above.)
Impatient me shot the next one only minutes later. If you stare at it for a bit you will notice that the moon has travelled a few percent further along. But you will also note that the exposure and/or processing improved the sunspots immensely.
I tried spacing them out from here so there was a least *some* noticeable difference :-) ... so let's see how I did.
And the moon finally gets the first of its prey ... the big sunspot in the middle of the sun is no more. Goodbye sweet sunspot, we shall mourn you for almost an hour ...
Had to skip the next one in sequence as it had a tragic auto focus accident ... as in it wouldn't. Again ... DUH! This leaves a bit of a jump to a smaller slice remaining than your eyes might expect.
And here begins the tilt ... it starts subtley, but that quickly changes (for you ... it slowly changed for me 😜) ...
You will have noticed by now, and it is even more obvious as you go forward that a sliver of the sun appears to be rotating around the moon. It would be very cool to see it happen as a video ... and maybe I will do that at some point ... But this is an illusion of course ... the moon is just passing the sun a very short distance offset from center to the southwest from our point of view -- as in, at this specific latitude and longitude. Others are having a different experience.
So the crescent that remains as the moon passes image by image through the sun is about 1% that is off-center and shifting bit by bit to the right and down.
And we arrive at the final image in the sequence. The exposure was increased somewhat aggressively when the sun was a tiny sliver as things got pretty dark around the yard. So when I realized that the sequence was reversing and quite a bit of the sun was exposed, I hurredly grabbed an image before packing it in. And of course I blew out the exposure something fierce 😜
I worked on it in Lightroom for quite a while and this is the compromise I arrived at. No Da Vinci here, but a serviceable image to prove that the world did not end at peak eclipseyness.
I hope you enjoyed these images as much as I did while shooting them and perhaps a lot more than when I was processing them. What a fabulous event that was ... uniting huge parts of the world (along a very narrow path 😜) in the quest to watch the two most important celestial bodies duke it out for our attention. I think the sun won in the end, but it was a close thing there for a moment.
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