Scattered Thoughts . . .

A bout a week before the eclipse, I brought the telescope I had planned to use for imaging outside to make sure everything was working together as it should.  I mainly wanted to check the new telescope mount with automatic GPS tracking but I figured I'd might as well put everything all together to test them.  The new mount worked just fine and that is where my attention was but it turns out that I had also found an unexpected problem.  I was getting a reflection of the sun in the lower left quadrant of the image which you can see in the animated GIF below.  While I was outside testing the mount, everything seemed to be working just fine but after bringing everything back indoors and uploading the photos and videos to my desktop computer, I noticed this odd reflection on my monitor.  I knew I had to correct that before the day of the eclipse. When I brought everything outside again for a second test, I found that the easiest way to eliminate this reflection was to tilt my solar filt

O kay, this is the blog entry I've been anticipating for the past month or two.  This was more than likely my last total solar eclipse so I wanted to make sure I document it as best as I can.   I've seen one or two other solar eclipses but not the way we viewed this one.  The next one in our area won't occur for another 30 years so, being realistic, it is highly unlikely I'll be around to see that one especially considering my health.  We got to see this one though and we even got to share this with our two oldest grandchildren, Lukey and Kenzie.  We always enjoy our time with Lukey and Kenzie but sharing this event with them made for an even more memorable experience.   Another thing that made this eclipse special is that we had good weather for it even though it was April in Waterbury.  We are usually socked in under clouds with precipitation falling from the sky from November through April so we got incredibly lucky for this event. ___________________________________

I 've been working on putting together a video of our total solar eclipse for a couple of days and it is in its final edit stage now.   The most time-consuming thing was actually viewing each and every video clip in its entirety.  Once I did that, then I needed to decide how much of each clip to use, where to use it in the video, and whether it should be viewed in real-time, slow motion or fast speed like a time-lapse.   Since this eclipse was a rather long event...  well, things happened quickly but the entire event was pretty close to a half day long, a full day if you include set up and tear down...  I knew that most of the clips would be in some multiple of fast motion.  It turns out that much of the video footage in this video is at around 10x real time speed.  When you speed up video, you can no longer use the embedded sound because it will just sound like Theodore, Simon and Alvin on too much caffeine.  So, the answer to that is to go through all the video clips in real-time

I pared down my selection of photos from our day of watching the solar eclipse to a nice, relatively small collection of good photos so I figured I would share a few of these photos here while I continue working on the video of the eclipse.   The video will require some additional time and effort.  I have started working on it but I quickly realized it will require a lot more time.  I have almost 20gb's of videos totaling more than an hour of running time.  Sorting, cutting and splicing video is time consuming.  Since I used multiple cameras with different views, I'll need to spend some time interweaving different views in the proper order which requires a bunch of cutting and pasting.  That sort of messes up a fluid sound track so then I need to get the sound track just right with more cutting and pasting as well as adding some background music.  In other words, compiling a video from so much data from multiple cameras requires a lot of time and effort so I need more time bef