On April 8, 2024, another total solar eclipse will pass over parts of the US.
Fortunately for me, this one will go right over where I live. A fellow photographer friend who lives out in the country not far from me is hosting an eclipse “day camp”, so I’ll be out there all day and hopefully avoiding the traffic.
My plan is to have two bodies shooting.
One will be on my Star Adventurer tracker with a 100-500mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter. I plan to have this one going the whole time, using an intervelometer to shoot once per minute during partial and once per second during totality (where I am, totality will be about 3.5 minutes).
The other will be a 70-200 on another tracker if I can manage to borrow a friend’s. Otherwise it’ll be on a geared head. I plan on it shooting once per second during totality. Although at 700mm (500mm * 1.4), my other camera won’t have the sun filling the entire frame, I’m concerned about not being able to capture the entire corona, hence the second body with the shorter lens.
That sounds really neat…and like a whole lot of very frantic activity for a few minutes!
I guess one does a dress rehearsal a few times with all of the gear so it’s not so frenzied and worrying when the moment comes.
I hadn’t ever tried the tracker for solar tracking before, but I did a test run last weekend and it’s not that difficult.
Unlike for night sky tracking where the exposure times can be in minutes and you want very precise tracking, for solar tracking I just basically want to keep the sun in the frame for multiple short exposures over a few hours. So, the precision required is much lower. Last weekend I was able to shoot two shots 40 minutes apart, and the sun had barely moved in the frame.
I plan to relax and enjoy this one - if we get to see it (we’ll be in Cleveland, so a total crapshoot). I did the one in 2017 and that’s enough. I should probably sell my solar filter, come to think of it.
I photographed the eclipse in 2017 without a tracker - just my Canon 60D on a tripod with a ballhead. I do have a Star Adventurer trcker and a CGEM astro mount, but I decided they’d be overkill so I just took my camera and Mannfrotto tripod. But if you want to take one of those long series of images showingnthe approach to totality and all that, yeah a tracker would make life easier.
Here’s a sample of my images. In this case, I took multiple exposures at different durations during totality so I could build an HDR image. I just used the kit 70-200mm zoom that came with the camera. I have better lenses, but none that go out to 200mm, and the lowest powered telescope I have has too narrow a field of view. The kit lens did fine.
You can also see the star Regulus in the bottom left. And though you can’t see it in this compressed image, the Moon’s surface is visible in the original, illuminated by reflected Earthlight. Pretty cool.
After the last eclipse, I formed the thought of hoping that by the time the next one came around, I might be able to afford some equipment better suited to photographing it. At this point, that’s looking rather dubious.
I took these pictures (actually, one picture, cropped different ways) using a Nikon D3200, with an ancient (late 1960s or early 1970s) Vivitar 85-205mm ƒ/3.8 zoom lens. It was an extremely lucky shot; there was very heavy cloud cover that day, with just enough of a short-lived thinning right at the peak of the eclipse to make it visible, while still reducing the brightness to a level that my camera, in that configuration, could handle.
I’d been hoping, before the next eclipse, to get, at the very least, a good neutral-density filter of an appropriate value, and possibly a much longer lens. Money is just too tight, right now, to spend it on such things, though.
I am expecting very big windfall in the not-too-distant future, and one thing that I am thinking of doing with some of it, is to buy a better camera; perhaps even the current top-of-the-line Z9. But that’s probably not going to happen in time for this eclipse; if it did, I’d certainly also seriously consider a much longer lens, and a good neutral-density filter to go with it.
“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here… in… the dark! Damn, I can’t see my notes. Well, meckaleckahi meckahineyho, you’re married now! Kiss the bride if you can find her mouth…”
I took a few short bursts of video during totality. This is one of the frames I like best. I do have a few with the ‘diamond ring’ effect but I haven’t really looked at those yet. Click the photo for the full frame.
