Recording the Partial Eclipse 10th of June 2002

After hearing about a partial eclipse that would occur in the late afternoon I decided try and capture a set of time lapsed pictures of the event.

Following instructions on the web I taped a pair of binoculars to a tripod and placed a white sheet of paper behind as a projection screen. A digital camera was then balanced on a box on the table to take the pictures. I attached the camera to my laptop so that I could take pictures automatically every minute or 30 seconds.
After some fiddling around I had focused the sun's image on to the paper. I then proceeded to take frames at 1 per a minute of the first 30 frames then two per a minute for the remaining 34 frames. Recording time started around 6pm while maximum eclipse was at about 6:16pm west coast time.
I cropped and re-sized the captured images and made a flash movie with them running at 5 frames per a second. Because of the rotation of the earth the sun slowly tracks across the paper sheet . Additionally as the sheet was at an angle to the binoculars the sun's image is slightly distorted. The combination of these two effects meant that the actual size and shape of the sun's image was different in each frame this is the major cause of the jumpiness of the movie. A tree starts to obscure the sun in the last few frames of the movie.

Reture to the main page.