Solar Eclipse thumbnails only

This composite image was my primary goal for the 2024 total solar eclipse. What I didn't foresee was the effort required to get the shots.

The weather forecast was the problem, and the over 1,000 miles added to the rental car tell only part of the story that included a day-prior relocation from an ideal shooting location in central TX to north central AR — storm unchasing.

Fortunately, the clear sky chase was successful, and the second-darkest exposures from the C1 brackets described in the Total Solar Eclipse Photography Plan provided the optimal exposures for this image.

The images in this composite were captured 1-second apart, illustrating how fast the favorite Baily's Beads stage passes.

The individual images are straight out of Lightroom with the default settings, with slight shadow brightness and clarity increases added to the final image in PS.

The left and right-side images are independently rotated to enable a horizontal format that retains clear visibility of the progression.

Most of us photographing a total solar eclipse capture images throughout the partial phases. While partial eclipse images are interesting, I quickly get bored of viewing circles with a bite out of them, including mine. Create a progression composite image that tells the "full" story, and you will have my attention. Thus, such an image was one of my goals for the 2024 total solar eclipse.

Aside from the center row, these images were captured 2.5 minutes apart. Even with a modest crop from an 840mm focal length, the individual Sony Alpha 1 images are large, and 77 of them in a single PS file created an unacceptable processor load. A 50% overall size reduction made the processing tolerable, and this image still weighs in at over 266 MP, enough resolution to print massive.

The goal for the middle portion of the total eclipse was to capture a wide range of bracketed exposures to pull out the distant corona. This image shows the result of one optional HDR processing technique.

The exposure bracketed images were loaded as Photoshop layers and manually aligned. Next, the opacity of each layer was reduced, allowing the next-lower layer to show through. The lowest included layer's opacity remains at 100%.

This image was modestly cropped from the top right to center the sun, but it shows an expected result from the 840mm focal length. This angle of view fills a substantial portion of the frame with the corona.

Want to contain the corona streamers within the frame? Do not use the brightest exposures in the HDR stack. The center image in the Total Solar Eclipse Phase Progression image illustrates this strategy.

The diamond in the ring is a tiny, overexposed portion of the sun peeking around the moon. The size of the diamond is determined by the exposure and the amount of sun shining through.

Such dramatic overexposure usually creates a bit of flaring, and the appearance of the flaring varies between lenses and the aperture opening in use. In general, the more the aperture is stopped down, the more dramatic the flare, including diffraction spikes coming off of the diamond.

The sun's corona outlines the ring.

Don't forget to create the solar eclipse smiley face image to commemorate the look on your face and that of everyone around you during totality.

Photography is fun. Include humor in your creativity. I thought a similar composite was entertaining and decided to create my 2024 version using unrotated images.

The moon's surface is not smooth. So, when the moon is nearly covering the sun, light finds its way through the moon's valleys while being blocked by the peaks.

This effect gives us "Baily's Beads". It's an awesome sight.

OK, perhaps calling it a composite would be more accurate, but "Hyper-HDR" makes a more-dramatic title, right?
 
During a solar eclipse, the moon moves between the sun and our viewing location, taking, minimally, a bite out of the solar disk. While it is possible to use an exposure that captures a small amount of detail in the moon during totality, I am not aware of anyone able to do so during the partial phases and, even during totality, the moon is poorly lit with the perimeter of the moon quickly becoming too bright. So, to get a perfect moon exposure, a composite is needed.
 
Remember us suggesting that you capture an image of the full moon just-prior to the August 2017 solar eclipse? Well, this post is about what you can do with that image.
 
Start by selecting one of your partial solar eclipse photos to use as the base image. The moon is going to show full regardless of the sun image selected and that means the balance between the amount of sun and moon showing is going to be determined by the sun image. I opted to show a significant portion of the sun in this composite. Hint: error on the side of showing too much sun because the moon can be positioned over more than just the missing portion of the sun.
 
Because my moon image showed a very slight amount of shadowing on the top right (clouds prevented me from getting an image on the night of the fullest moon), the bottom-left side of the moon blended better with the sun, driving my option to select a sun image with the top-right being eclipsed.
 
Process both of the images (if captured in RAW format) and open them as layers in an image editing program (Photoshop is perfect). Position the moon image on the top layer and use a layer mask to allow only the moon itself to remain visible (masking out all of the black). Reposition the moon layer so that it aligns properly over the sun and make any layer mask edits necessary for ideal blending.
 
That's it. The perimeter of the image will be pure black, so feel free to adjust the framing or cropping or even increase the canvas size to create the final image desired.
 
OK, so you missed one or both of these events? No problem. Get your solar filter and take a picture of the sun on the next clear day. Then, on a clear night during the next full moon, capture the moon image with the same lens (sans solar filter of course). Process both images and position your cut-out moon partially over the sun, creating a fake solar eclipse. Very few will spot the difference.

One of my goals for the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse was to bracket exposures ranging from no-blown-color-channels to as bright as I could create. Using three custom modes set for AEB (Auto Exposure Bracketing), I was able to capture 21 images with exposures ranging from 1/8000, f/8 ISO 100 to 1 sec, f/4 ISO 800, covering over 18 stops of exposure difference.
 
You may have noted that I was using an f/2.8 lens and could have opened up one stop wider. I decided that vignetting at f/2.8 took away most of the wider aperture advantage in the periphery and, with the sun creating the most light in the center of the frame, the periphery brightness was what I needed most from this frame. So, I opted to stay with f/4.
 
A number of the darkest images in the set proved too dark to be useful. In the brightest image, all three channels were blown in nearly half of the image. Thus, I felt successful in meeting that goal.
 
There was of course a purpose to that goal and that purpose was to create an HDR image that made as much of corona visible as possible. While I also had a 200mm lens deployed with the same purpose, the 400mm angle of view fully contained the maximum corona able to be captured under the slightly hazy Tennessee skies.
 
To create this image, I stacked 14 exposures using (essentially) the solar eclipse bracketing procedure I recently shared. I think that I could continue tweaking this result indefinitely, but ... it is time to label it "finished" and move on to all of the others.
 
In this case, you could say that I got a "star" for effort.