Shooting the Sun

[tbutler]

...or, we've hit the moon, why not the sun?

This one isn't turning out as well as I'd hoped; trying to get solid focus is tricky, the sun is a featureless disc for the most part. There's really nothing to scale unless you have sunspots to look at. There was a batch of clouds coming across at one point:



--but they weren't a lot of help. The whole point of this is getting practice to shoot the eclipse on the 21st, and the most important things aren't going to show until the actual eclipse. ^^;;

Obligatory Note to people thinking of doing this - You need a special solar filter to pull off this kind of thing. The sun can and will burn out the sensor of a digital camera, without a filter that works on infrared and UV as well as visible light. And if it's a digital SLR where you're actually looking through the lens instead of through an electronic viewfinder, you will burn out your eyes as well. Get and use a filter, people! :)

Comments

[yhlee]

Best wishes with your eclipse photography! =D

(Haha, yeah, I remember when a partial eclipse came through when I lived in Korea as a child, we "watched" through light through pinholes, and they cautioned us not to look at the sun!)