Capturing the Solar Eclipse

A friend of mine (with family in the Miramichi) and I elected to head there for the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, in the hope of capturing totality (where Halifax was only expected to see about 95% coverage). We did some scouting the day we arrived, and decided that the retired CF-101 Voodoo gate guarding at the former CFB Chatham was a good piece of foreground to include in our images.

An image of the CF-101 Voodoo under the eclipse at totality with the phases of the eclipse composited in.

Each of us had multiple cameras set up to capture the event - to create this image I had one camera with a 16-35mm lens mounts on a tripod as low to the ground as possible (which captured the overall image of the plane at totality), plus a second camera on a tripod with the equivalent of 420mm of telephoto lens to capture the sun itself during the eclipse. 

The original image, before the eclipse phases were added, looks like this:

The original image showing only totality of the eclipse. As you can see, the streetlights came on.

I used the smallest aperture possible on that lens (f/4) to get the starburst effect from the sun and lights, but this meant that I had a considerable amount of dust spots to remove from the image - despite having cleaned my camera sensor prior to making the image.

The second camera was a 16-year old DSLR as don't have the adapter for the older lenses, and I wanted the longest reach possible. I didn't have welder's glass or the appropriate filters available, so I had to improvise - I put what ND filters I had on the lens, and to avoid damaging the camera sensor I only pointed the camera at the sun long enough to take each image. To protect my eyes from the sun - I would surely have done damage looking directly at the sun through the camera's optical viewfinder - I held the back of my hand in front of the viewfinder and knew I had the sun within the frame when the sun shone through the viewfinder onto my hand, and I would capture several frames. I had to focus manually using the scale on the lens, based on some homework I had done in advance.

Telephoto image of the sun at a focal length of 420mm during the eclipse.

I captured images of the eclipse on both cameras throughout the eclipse - both to get the multiple phases of the moon's passage across the sun, as well as to record the sun's path over the top of the jetfighter. I used the latter images to draw lines on the overall image so that I could somewhat accurately paste in the phases of the eclipse to the overall image. 

Overall image showing the lines I used to guide where the eclipse phase images were pasted in.

I then chose representative images of the various eclipse phases, reduced them in size to reflect the size of the sun in the base image, and pasted them in on either side of the sun in totality within the two lines. Unfortunately, I stupidly forgot to change my exposure on the camera with the telephoto lens and didn't capture a closeup of totality, so I have to use the one from the base wide-angle image - which seems to actually work. Overall, I'm fairly pleased with the "final" product - thought I suspect I will continue to play with it in the coming weeks to see if I can improve it.

I also had a third camera that I used hand-held as a backup to the other two - it provides a slightly different vantagepoint on the Voodoo. 

Hand-held image of the Voodoo with a 28-75mm zoom lens.

These may have to do, as I don't know that I will ever again have the opportunity to capture a solar eclipse.