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.