Eclipse: Canon 5D Mark II set with priority to aperture, manual focusing, mirror lift separated from sensor exposure ➞ 2 triggers for one picture with a manual intervalometer.
Image calibration for totality: 10 darks by exposure taken after totality plus 11 flats taken with my MacBookPro's white screen before optical setup disassembly.
Processing with Siril (raw image conversions and calibrations) , FiJi (automatic registration), Adobe Lightroom (image selection), Photoshop (enhancements, color balance, cropping...) and After Effects (manual registration, animation)
- Time-lapse: 1 image per min
- Sub-pixel manual registration in After Effects.
- Addition of the first 13 images to enhance the solar spots
- Fusion of the solar spots with the time-lapse images in Photoshop
- Video in After Effects
Partial phase
Totality
- 1 to 6 images according to the exposure, registration and addition, enhancement and montage.
- HDR: The brightness of the corona drops by a factor of more than 10,000 between the lunar limb and the tips of the streamers: no single exposure can record it all. The final image combines 19 exposures from 1/200 s to 2.5 s (5 exposure times), shot during the 87 s of totality with the Sun only 5.5° above the horizon
- Calibration in Siril: dark frames for each exposure time, flat field, hot-pixel correction, debayering; data kept linear (32-bit)
- Registration by hand in Photoshop, frame by frame, on the corona only, with the Moon masked: it moved about 40" relative to the Sun during totality and fooled both the eye and automatic registration
- HDR fusion with a custom C++/OpenCV program: each pixel built from the correctly exposed frames only, saturated pixels discarded smoothly, outlier rejection, true exposure times measured in the images themselves (they differ from the nominal shutter speeds by a few %)
- Logarithmic stretch to compress the huge brightness range
- Fine-structure enhancement by Multi-scale Gaussian Normalization (Morgan & Druckmüller, 2014), applied gently and to the red and green channels only (the blue channel is too noisy)
- Color: sky background neutralized, corona set to white, sky desaturated
- Final touches in Photoshop: lunar disk, circular framing, noise reduction
Other pictures with iPhones, Video with Galaxy Flip 4: processing with AfterEffects and Handbrake
Observation spot
- Location: Google Maps
- Astronomical data: Paris Observatory
- Caption overlay: https://www.peakfinder.com and Adobe Photoshop. Image computations and C++ coding: Claude AI
All the computing job done on my trusty Intel Core i9 MacBookPro 16Go RAM (2019) running OSX Sequoia