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In the morning hours of June 10, a solar eclipse greeted a “ring of fire” for skywatchers in the northeastern United States, northern Canada, Europe, northern Asia, Russia, and Greenland. While most photographers took individual photos of the eclipse, Göran Strand decided to show the entire rare eclipse from the backyard of his home in Östersund, Sweden.
Using 50,000 still images equivalent to more than 250 gigabytes of data, Strand was able to show a two-and-a-half hour eclipse in just 10 seconds. While most people will only see images of the climax of the “Ring of Fire,” the time lapse generated by the Strand is a very smooth depiction of how the moon moves in front of the sun.
This type of ring event occurs when the Moon is close to its farthest point from Earth during an eclipse, making the Moon appear smaller than the Sun in the sky, not obscuring the entire solar disk.
To add to the remarkable feat of capturing the motion of the eclipse itself, Strand also captured all of the solar prominences. Solar prominence is a large, bright feature that extends outward from the surface of the Sun. Strand also shows a close-up of the largest notable place with a graduated floor graphic next to it. With this fascinating graphic, it’s easy to see how nearly a million planets could fit inside the massive star.
With so many frames captured, Strand told PetaPixel how he had adjusted the solar eclipse interval.
“To capture the interval, I captured a series of 200 frames every 30 seconds for 2.5 hours,” he explains. From each of the 200 frames clip, I stacked, aligned, and calibrated the top 50 frames. In total, I ended up with 250 calibrated still images and then further processing them. First, I aligned all 250 images, sharpened the details, and then extracted the data Which showed all the highlights. Then I had my final time-delay photos.”
Because eclipses and other notable astronomical events happen so rarely, less-than-ideal weather is always a challenge for those photographers hoping to capture the event.
“I’ve been doing astrophotography for over 25 years, and one of the things I’ve learned is accepting bad weather and the frustration it usually brings during events like this,” Stand says. “On this day the weather forecast was very good but clouds were expected later in the day. When only 10-15 minutes left from the eclipse some clouds were moving but they stayed away from the sun so I am really glad I got this perfect eclipse time.
“It is exciting to follow such eclipses. Although I have seen three total solar eclipses, such events always give me some goosebumps when you realize you are actually catching them.”
With over a quarter century of experience, Strand is clearly an experienced astrophotographer. For those who want to follow in his footsteps, he gives his advice to newcomers.
“If you want to get started with photography of celestial bodies, I recommend going slow. Don’t rush to buy a big, expensive telescope and go looking for planets. Planet photography is very difficult and takes several years to master. Start with a telephoto lens and take pictures of the moon and then stack them together to get More details,” he says.
“This is a technique called Lucky Imaging and it’s a great way to get sharp images of the planets as well as the Sun and Moon even through very turbulent air. When you have your images, it’s time to practice editing them. AutoStacker! is my favorite program for stacking images of celestial bodies. Above all, Enjoy and take a moment to realize how small we are in the grand scheme of space.”
Image credits: Images by Joran Strand used with permission.
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