Eclipse from Casper Wyoming

[TCampbell]

I traveled 1400 miles to get to Casper because of the high probability of clear weather. I was rewarded with these.

There actually were a few thin clouds between the camera & sun. It's not visible in the shorter exposures, but it is visible in the longer exposures (it causes the interior of the eclipse where the moon should be black to glow with light - so I'll probably have to stack composite an image to get the results I want). Anyway... here are a few shots.


Chromosphere Prominences during the Total Solar Eclipse 2017 by Tim Campbell, on Flickr


3rd Contact Diamond Ring from 2017 Total Solar Eclipse by Tim Campbell, on Flickr


Chromosphere at 3rd Contact during Total Solar Eclipse 2017 by Tim Campbell, on Flickr


Solar Corona with Prominences during Total Solar Eclipse 2017 by Tim Campbell, on Flickr


2017 Total Solar Eclipse from Casper Wyoming (HDR) by Tim Campbell, on Flickr

All but the last image are single frames. The final image is an HDR composite.

 

[ronlane]

Very nice Tim.

 

[tirediron]

Nice... too long a drive for me though.

 

[weepete]

lovely shots Tim

 

[Peeb]

Worth the trip!! Nice.

 

[waday]

Amazing shots. I was hoping you'd post some shots of the eclipse

 

[TCampbell]

BTW, I forgot to mention, I had two cameras imaging the eclipse and a third grabbing shots of us watching the eclipse.

One camera was my Canon 60Da with the Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM II and Canon Extender 1.4x III. That camera was mounted on a Losmandy StarLapse tracking head and a beefy camera tripod (Manfrotto 057 series).

The other was my Canon 5D III using a TeleVue NP101is apochromatic refractor (540mm focal length with a 101mm (4") aperture) making it an f/5.4 scope... except I was using a TeleVue 2x PowerMate ... making the effective focal length 1080mm at f/11. That camera & scope were mounted on a Losmandy G11 equatorial mount.

Both cameras were equatorially mounted, tracking, and oriented so that north is up in the images. But I should point out that "Earth's" north is up. Since Earth is tilted roughly 23.5º on it's axis relative to our orbit plane, that means the the Sun's axis and Earth's axis are not parallel... hence the Sun appears to be slightly tilted counter-clockwise.

It's probably easiest to see this in the 4th image... note the fine parallel whisps at roughly the 11 o'clock position and 5 o'clock position. The Sun's north pole is located at about 11 o'clock... the Sun's south pole is located at about 5 o'clock.

The Sun takes nearly a month to do a complete spin (although the equatorial region has a fast angular rate of rotation than the polar regions) so if you watch sunspots or other solar activity, you'll see them slowly migrate from the left side (around the 8 o'clock area in my images) toward the right side (around the 2 o'clock area in my images) and it will take just shy of about 2 weeks for a sunspot group to make that migration across the face of the sun (of course the groups are changing all the time and new groups form, old groups eventually disappear, etc.)

I'll sometimes look for sunspot groups and estimate when they'll reach the limb on the right side because that often means we'll see some nice prominences in profile... always interesting both for visual as well as solar photography.


We did have a few clouds, but they were light and fairly transparent. In my diamond-ring shot (2nd image captured at the eclipse's third-contact) the diamond ring has an interesting glow around it... that's actually because there's a cloud in the way and you're seeing the cloud exaggerate the glow on the diamond ring. I think it would have been a cleaner shot if the cloud hadn't been there... but I kind of like the glow so I'll take it.

I did NOT get a good shot of the "Earthshine" effect on the Moon. One shot that some eclipse photographers went for was taking an extended shot during totality ... heavily over-exposing the corona, but enough to finally get some detail on the Moon's surface to show up (you see this in some eclipse shots if you search the web). Unfortunately when I captured that shot, the thin clouds caused so much glow that the moon was completely washed out and I still didn't get much in the way of surface detail (nothing like I wanted.)