I shot several hours of video last August during the 2017 Solar Eclipse. While most of it just shows the sun slowly getting more and more covered by the Moon (we had, I believe, 94% totality in my area) until it’s nothing but a crescent, a few frames from the video proved better than normal, namely for how they were recorded.
Remember, I used a perfectly normal consumer grade camera to record the event, shielding the sensor of the camera with a welding helmet lens or, at certain times, the eclipse viewing glasses I had for the event.
The welding glass gave a very green color to everything, but proved a great way to film the event. A few shots, however, taken with the glasses, really showed things in a way that I didn’t realize I was capturing at the time.
Namely, these two frames – one taken early on, and another taken near the end.
The first looks pretty ordinary – you have cloud wisps at the bottom and the Moon beginning to show itself near the top, but one thing caught my eye later on looking over the footage – you can just barely see sunspots.
Think about that. With proper shielding, my perfectly typical consumer equipment was able to capture sunspots. That’s just awesome.
The other is a more typical shot, but one that I thought was pretty awesome – it shows the Sun about near the middle of the eclipse as visible from my area, just a thin sliver of what it normally is. It was an interesting thing to see, to say the least, and also shows just how good (yet simultaneously how bad) consumer grade equipment is at some things.
Why am I sharing these now, you might ask?
Because tonight we will have the launch of a mission to, effectively, touch the sun. The Parker Solar Probe. The launch date, August 11th, is just 11 days shy of 1 year from the anniversary of the 2017 eclipse, and I felt now was as good a time as any to share these images.
Also, I always intended to do more with the footage I shot, but never did. Might as well throw these images on the site for future use, as well as to act as a nice spacer from the last articles. 😉
Maybe sometime soon I’ll get around to compiling and uploading the video I took of the eclipse, but that’s to be decided…
More to come, as always. For now, details on the Parker Solar Probe mission!