Fully partial

Folks in a large swath of the western hemisphere were fortunate to have the opportunity to see an annular solar eclipse today (weather permitting, of course). We decided to forgo a drive to the path of annularity, opting instead to watch it as a partial eclipse — from our front porch. We got lucky as a thin layer of cirrus blew out of the way just in time, and I was able to make some photos.

Fully partial -- partial solar eclipse photographed a few minutes past maximum.

This was the eclipse as seen from Denver, about 10 minutes past maximum. Look closely, and you can see a sunspot in the upper right part of the crescent.

EXIF:
OM System OM-1 camera, M.Zuiko 100-400mm f/5.0-6.3 lens, MC-14
560mm, f/9.0, 1/320 sec, ISO 500

Colorado away!

Liftoff of a Colorado-themed hot air balloon at the closing session of the (rain plagued) 50th annual Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

Colorado away!

We haven’t had a chance to attend the Fiesta for years, but this year’s event lined up perfectly with some family travel we had on the calendar. We showed up in town the Friday night at the end of the Fiesta, just in time for the Saturday morning and evening main events to be cancelled due to bad weather (an unusually wet October for New Mexico meant many events were cancelled through the week).

Luckily for spectators and the remaining balloonists, the weather improved overnight, so the Sunday morning mass ascension could still take place. A lot of pilots had given up before that point, so it was a relatively “thin” mass ascension, but we were all happy to see a respectable number of balloons airborne.

EXIF:
OM Digital OM-1, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 II lens
34mm, f/13, 1/80 sec, ISO 200

Crop circles

Seen on a recent flight east (somewhere over eastern Colorado / western Nebraska), it’s center-pivot agricultural fields in the midst of what are essentially stabilized sand dunes:

Crop circles

It’s late-afternoon raking light like this that really brings out the ancient nature of Colorado’s eastern plains’ “sand hill” terrain. It’s all a desert dune field, (temporarily) frozen in place

Looking down on Long Beach

Long Beach, Long Island, New York — as seen from 35,000 feet above:

Looking down on Long Beach

If you were curious, those dark lines converging toward the horizon are the shadows of clouds and haze in the atmosphere, and are officially called anticrepuscular rays.  A little nugget for everybody’s vocabulary…

EXIF:
Olympus E-M1, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 lens at 22mm
ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/800 sec.

Corona, revisited

I’ll admit, I’m new to solar eclipse photography, much less to post-processing of solar eclipse images — so I’ll freely admit to being on a learning curve here.  My previous post contained an image put together from 7 photographs, using some commercial HDR software.  Subsequently, I found two helpful videos on how to do a similar thing using Photoshop (and it’s a pretty quick process, too) — here are my results:

Corona, revisited

This took a bit longer to produce, but I like the results better.  Your thoughts?

Back from eclipsing

So we recently returned from a weekend trip to witness the 2017 total solar eclipse.  Long story there, when I get the chance to write it up — but the bottom line is that we successfully made it to a spot of land with clear skies, and even our teenager was impressed.  I’ve been tinkering around with various approaches for processing my photos (most HDR software has trouble with totality photos), here’s the first corona HDR image I’m mostly satisfied with:

Corona, 2017

FWIW, this was made from 7 stacked images using Aurora HDR 2017 software.

Waiting for the light to go out

So, with about half of North America, I plan on driving to the path of totality for the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse on August 21.  I was originally going to write up some tutorial information on this, but since so much of it is already available, I thought it best to primarily link to the sites I think are most helpful. Continue reading