Just two today – or is it three? How does one count these accurately? I don’t want to get in trouble with the IRS…
This one comes from the same session as these, but I didn’t notice this detail until I had brought the image up at full resolution to see if it retained critical sharpness. I don’t recall the pair of circling bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) to be making any noise, but a sequence of images seems to show otherwise; maybe I’d tuned it out, maybe I’d lost it in the wind noise off of the lake. They definitely look more dynamic when the beak is open – and probably more representative of our nation as well. Is he saying something about getting to the moon without using the metric system, you think?
Meanwhile, an image back from the total solar eclipse.
As the sun was disappearing with totality beginning, I just held the shutter release down and fired off a long sequence of images as it vanished; this is the last one in the series. I had only guesstimated the exposure needed (intending to capture the diamond ring) and was well under-exposed, but it does show Baily’s Beads disappearing, and the barest hint of a solar prominence. It’s framed this way for a reason, however, because I then played with the exposure after the fact:
I was curious to see if I could make out the outline of the moon in the weak coronal effect, and I could – it’s grainy, but the outline is there. Two more prominences became visible as well.
Now, a small note: I originally edited and uploaded the eclipse post while working remotely on a laptop (of sorts,) but when I got back home and looked at the posted images on my routine desktop computer, I found that I could make out twice as much detail. I’d actually gone into the monitor settings for the laptop, before I left on the trip, and set them for a much better display, though I didn’t have a decent calibration image handy when I did so. My desktop monitor is clearly much better, though, and I’m not sure if this is solely due to being calibrated better, or if it’s a higher quality display – or both. But for your sake, if you can’t make out a faint outline all around the moon in the last image, your contrast or gamma settings could probably stand tweaking. And if you’re a photographer, it’s definitely a useful thing to have these set as well as you can manage.