Eclipse Animation

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Partial Eclipse of the Sun
Partial eclipse, October 14, near peak in Houston

Well, it's been a week since the eclipse, and I've was finally able to re-process my photos.

Quick recap: I had a Canon RP (Paid link), 150-600mm Sigma lens (Paid link) at 600mm, a solar filter over the lens, and a Sky-Watcher sun tracking mount (Paid link). I had a $20 intervalometer (Paid link) taking a photo every 5 seconds. (Pro-tip: make sure you get the right model of intervalometer for your camera!) Oh, and I used a 2TB Samsung SSD (Paid link) to hold the half terabyte of intermediate data I managed to generate.

In total, there were over 2,000 photos taken. Since I stayed in Houston, the eclipse "only" got to 85%, which was still pretty great.

Now, either due to a combination of wind, user error, and perhaps some tracking error, the sun kind of wandered around the frame over the course of the eclipse. (It never was out of frame, so that's good.)

To fix it, I used ImPPG (available on Mac and Windows) to ~~tweak the light curve of each image and~~ align the frames, and ffmpeg to create the animation. The net result took hours of processing.

So without further ado, check out the video below.

Update: after spending 7+ hours processing the individual RAW files into TIFs and batch adjusting their curves, I realized the final result was... terrible. I ended up just running the out-of-camera jpegs through ImPPG to align the frames only, and then ran ffmpeg to generate the movie. I loaded the movie into Davinci Resolve Studio, and used that to tweak the colors and further stabilize the footage. I need to work on isolating the tripod better next time.