I’ll just need to sell my car.
Google owes somebody for all the lost productivity today.
Annular Solar Eclipse Time Lapse 5/20/2012
Being a fairly rare event we decided to take a couple of hours and drive down to Cove Fort, UT. This was just inside the line where you get the ring of fire. There’s a great BLM road right off the Cove Fort exit that goes west. It’s one of those roads in Utah that after driving for about five miles you start hearing the theme from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in your head. So we stopped at a sufficiently desolate and dusty spot and set up some equipment. Here’s what I used to get the video:
- Televue Ranger
- Coronado SolarMax 40
- Mintron security cam
- DV Camcorder
I just sold my soul to Adobe for the CS6 ‘Creative Cloud’ subscription so I used Premiere to edit the video and add titles. It does a better job with titles than Sony Vegas and it allows you to enter a custom rate for the speed that appears to be unlimited. The finished one minute clip is time-compressed down from the original 45 minutes of source video. The first sections are running at 1000-2000% normal speed and the last few sections are at 6000%. I had the scope on a cheap Orion equatorial mount so you can see the drift especially at the end. In the end this was well worth the drive. I’ll post some additional photos here soon. Looking forward to the Venus transit on June 5th!
Moonrise over Utah Lake. This was the day before the full moon dubbed ‘Super Moon’. I’ll be doing more of these in the future. The look of the golden clouds at sunset passing in front of the moon at time lapse speed is something special.
Details:
Nikon D300s
24-120mm @ 55mm
f/5.6 @ 1/80 sec
I recently got the Photomatix HDR lightroom plug-in as an anniversary gift from my awesome wife. So here’s one of the first shots I came across where I took multiple bracketed exposures on a tripod. It was out on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake. This type of processing is already in Photoshop, but does take a lot of tinkering and finesse, where this plug-in gets it amazingly right in a few clicks.
First time at the Utah .NET User Group Meeting
I’ve been meaning to check this out and finally made it. There was a great presentation by Mike Clement on Linq. I hadn’t studied Linq too much so there were some new concepts I’ll have to learn. Oh and there was pizza provided by Robert Half. That’s always a plus! It’s also a good setting to make contacts with those who are hiring.
