Pleased as punch with results

Support for the Solar Eclipse Maestro photography software.

Pleased as punch with results

Postby mmckeag » Tue Aug 29, 2017 12:37 am

Xavier,

I'm pleased as punch with SEM's performance on eclipse day. My goal was to front-load all the eclipse photography technical details so that on eclipse morning I could just sit back and enjoy the event directly, undistracted by photography. It worked!! The weeks, days, and hours of preparation for eclipse morning were intense, but from the moment I finished synching computer time to GPS time, took a deep breath, and put SEM on real time I was a spectator, except for removing filters at C2 and replacing them at C3. During totality I stood between the two cameras, a solar filter in each hand, looking up, oblivious to the rapid chatter of camera shutters beside me. The abrupt appearance of C3 diamond ring was ample notification it was time to replace filters. The voice prompt from the laptop was redundant.

At our location overlooking the Sheep Rock Unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in eastern Oregon we had clear sky on eclipse morning with a very thin wisp of wildfire smoke. It didn't interfere signficantly with our view or the photographs. HDR sets recorded corona out to 5 solar radii, and captured some albedo contrast from earthshine on the moon. Regulus was conspicuous in the close-up, tracked image set, and high pass filters applied in processing the totality HDR set brought out Nu Leonis as well.

The preceding weeks were a frenzy of preparation and SEM script editing and testing. The past week has been an image processing workshop. So many new tools and techniques to master, so much raw data to sift through and process.

Several of us are already planning for Chile or Argentina in 2019 and central Mexico in 2024. Closer to home and in time, I've started planing for the total lunar eclipse the morning of 31 January 2018. After what I went through photographing the series of four total lunar eclipses a couple years ago, the prospect of applying LEM's level of automation to a lunar eclipse is pretty exciting.

Mike
mmckeag
 
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Joined: Wed Aug 02, 2017 1:27 am
Location: Mosier, OR, USA

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