Eclipse — April 8, 2024 — Marion, IL

OK, here are my few photos from yesterday’s (April 8, 2024) eclipse. Don’t expect much as this is more about me documenting the effort for myself than showing off amazing images . . . which I don’t have. I have images I’m happy with, especially considering I wasn’t planning on taking many photos.

Most of the images were taken with the Samsung S23 Ultra, and some of the totality images were taken with the D7500. I didn’t bother with a solar filter for the SLR because I didn’t want the temptation to do something that might interfere with experiencing the event.

Some mistakes were made, but overall I’m happy with both the experience and what few images I got, especially since I did zero research or testing before the event.

Here goes nothing . . .

That was the first image I snapped with my phone, taken by holding one of my extra solar eclipse glasses in front of the phone camera’s 10X lens. It should not have to be mentioned, but it’s best to hold the solar filter portion as flat as possible against the phone’s lens.

Let me comment for a moment about setting the phone to take these images. I used the ‘Pro’ mode because it allowed me to take both RAW and JPG images with each shot. It also allows for manually adjusting the f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. The phone automatically sets the exposure compensation.

Just for grins, I tried using the regular camera app, but, as I feared, the app in its default mode didn’t fare well. It wants to brighten the image and consequently has trouble focusing on anything, and you get a blob.

The first image of the Moon encroaching on the sun wasn’t bad, but I wanted a bit more definition. By the way, the banding you see is an artifact of the JPG compression. I ended up using the JPG files because they were easier to manipulate. I could avoid those by using RAW images and outputting higher-quality JPGs. I didn’t bother because the subsequent images were better.

. . . and because I’m not trying to compete with the literally thousands (if not millions) of more serious photographers out there (HERE).

Much better. I changed the shutter speed to adjust for the changing amount of occlusion, but that kind of image is what I was looking for.

A proper photographer might have set a timer and snapped photos at regular intervals, but I’m not that guy, at least not in this instance. I snapped images when I felt like it, opting, for the most part, to just watch the progression toward totality.

Once totality was achieved, I didn’t need the solar filter.

Obviously, the slow shutter speed was a tad too slow . . . I tried 1/500 sec but found the 1/1500 sec speed produced an image more to my liking.

I was super-impressed that the phone resolved the largest Solar Prominences<<link. That’s the small reddish dots near the six and one o’clock positions.

Since I had a few minutes, I decided to shoot a few images with the D7500, and this is where I wish I had taken the time to set the camera up ahead of time. I had the camera on manual, and as I struggled to see details in low light, I ended up shooting at a 1/5000 sec shutter speed and pushing the ISO to 32000. Later, I read I should have used ISO 200, f/8 or f/9, and speeds of 1 sec to 1/1000 sec, depending on what I wanted to achieve.

The gallery has a number of images processed in different ways, but I’ll only show a few here. I was looking for a balance between showing the outward corona glow and the details at the edge of the disk.

Although shot with the same settings and processed nearly identically, a few images had a color cast to them . . .

I tried different brightness settings and got to see different details with each version . . .

Here’s one of the images I thought showed the prominences better than most . . .

Here’s a tighter crop of the above . . .

At this point, the totality was almost done, and I debated trying to photograph the diamond ring effect at the end of the totality, but opted to just watch it . . . it was glorious.

Then, back to the phone with the sun filter . . .

I could be mistaken, but the dark spot on the sun could be a sunspot<<link. At first, I thought it might have been on the lens, but it’s unlikely it would always show up on the sun over the course of an hour and with multiple changes on how I held the phone. I’m even more impressed with the phone’s imaging ability if it is a sunspot.

So, here’s a GIF of the images (there’s a slideshow at the bottom), but I warn you it’s about 8MB. Depending on your internet speed, it may or may not show up right away. Also, some of the images have a significant amount of banding. That’s a limitation of the GIF format, which reduces millions of colors to 256.

Also, I manually aligned the images when I cropped them (remember, I hand-held the phone), so they jump around a bit. Also, at the tail end, I aligned the crescent to a lower reference point since I didn’t know where the top of the disk would end up in the final image.

It’s a crappy animation, but that’s the best I could do because I’m neither a proper nor conscientious hobbyist.

Are we done? Well, no . . . Because I wasn’t planning on photographing much, I set up the D7000 to snap photos every five seconds, starting about 3 minutes before the totality and to about three minutes after the totality. The plan was to generate a timelapse of the event.

I’m not sure what happened, but while the front portion of the sequence is fine, the back end (past where I stopped the timelapse) was all messed up. The totality was also screwed up because all the images are completely black. Even shooting RAW, I could not coax anything from them. I obviously guessed wrong on what exposure to use, but even so, I can’t explain why the images after the totality were basically useless.

The video below shows the timelapse images that were salvaged.

Wait! We’re not done yet. Also because I wasn’t planning on focusing on photography, I set up the P900 to look toward the West to try and capture the coming of the totality and subsequent return to normalcy.

Again, a slight mistake as I positioned it with the mystery pole smack in the middle of the frame. My field of view is much larger than the cameras, and I’m used to ignoring the pole. I should have moved the camera about 30 feet to the right for a clear view.

The original is 8 minutes long (two minutes on each side of the totality) and is a bit boring other than you get to hear my neighbor, birds, and the shutter of the D7000. I should have had some separation between the cameras, so that was another mistake.

The original can be watched HERE, but below, I link the version I speeded up and added music to. The video is 4′ 20″ long. If the music is annoying, turn it off. The vignette is from the hood I added to the lens to keep the sun from causing flares on the image.

My impressions… well, it was awesome, of course. If you pay attention to the video in the distance, you can see a murmur of birds looking for a place to roost. The birds’ songs also changed.

My neighbor told me that the birds got completely quiet in the 2017 eclipse (also a total eclipse for the area), and they could hear crickets and cicadas. One person I know who lives outside of town said he heard coyotes. That eclipse for that year was in August, so that would account for the crickets and cicadas.

The shadow of the 2017 eclipse traveled more West-to-East, whereas this was more South-to-North. I don’t know if that made any difference, as the West-East direction might have appeared more ‘natural’. I’m not an expert, but I occasionally stay at Holiday Inn Express hotels, so my words might seem like I know what I’m talking about (joke).

I’ll put up some links I found interesting below. Meanwhile, this is the LINK to the SmugMug Gallery, and this is the slideshow:

Slideshow of the Eclipse 08APR24 – Marion, IL SmugMug Gallery (47 images).

Useful Information:

What is a Solar Eclipse?

Paths of 15 total Solar Eclipses

Animals and Solar Eclipses

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

<><><><o><><><><><o><><><>

Note: If you are not reading this blog post at DisperserTracks.com, know it’s copied without permission and likely used by someone with nefarious intentions, like attracting you to a malware-infested website.  Could be they also torture small mammals.

Note 2: Sharing a link that points back here is perfectly OK.

<><><><o><><><><><o><><><>

If you’re new to this blog, reading the FAQ page might be a good idea. If you’re considering subscribing, it’s definitely a good idea to read both the About page and the FAQ page.