I have a collection of semi-recent but unrelated images in the blog folder awaiting my attention, either to include them in a post or simply discard them as irrelevant, and so I decided that I’d do posts around a single image, partially because I haven’t been posting much and this is easier. Somewhere in there will sneak in a couple of longish, philosophical posts as I get motivated to tackle them, but for now we have these.
This one I’m faintly annoyed with myself over. Not because of the image itself, which is not bad for an initial experiment, but because I didn’t do the experiment sooner. It is the sun of course, through the solar filter material that I purchased specifically for the total solar eclipse in April. The material was/is flimsy mylar film however, and to keep it in good shape I sandwiched it between two pieces of picture frame glass and made a holder to go onto the lenshood of the Tamron 150-600 to keep them all in place. The results were terrible, and while I did a few frames during the eclipse, to say that they’re unremarkable is vastly understating it.
Then recently, I created a new holder that simply clamped the edges of the filter but otherwise left it alone ahead of the lens, and got this result. Well, shit – that would have been nice to have during the eclipse, right? And I kick myself for not trying it before now – in fact, I’m wondering how the experiment escaped me, because I was suspicious of the quality of the glass even back then.
But I also recall that I was ass-deep in the tracking motor project, concentrating on getting some esoteric images during totality, and that this dragged on with issue after issue right up until the day before the eclipse, when I finally gave it up. I had rebuilt the platform, re-printed several parts, tried umpteen different variations of the motor driving software, re-ordered another motor and a driver for that, fretted through interminable and pointless postal delays, switched software, and so on. It was obsessive, and truth be told, I wasn’t really fired up to get images of the partially eclipsed sun as much as what totality might allow.
Still, damn, should have at least tried a quick experiment.
By the way, those are indeed sunspots, with perhaps a hint of clouds around the edges – I was timing the sun between appearances of scattered clouds and may have caught the vestiges of some, which I wouldn’t have been able to see in the glare. That one spot in the middle is so distinct and round that I wondered if I didn’t catch Mercury in front of the sun, but no, Stellarium told me it was well off to the side. And just so you know, I’ve been trying to reprint a better filter holder, but my 3D printer is being balky for as-yet unknown reasons, and other projects have prevented me from troubleshooting this right now. I know you need this minutia to feel complete…