Eclipse video

Roman Lando

All right, it was not ideal, and almost didn't happen, but we did it, we've experienced the total eclipse despite a total cloud cover which miraculously cleared just in time to experience totality.

Video stabilisation in DaVinci Resolve. The video starts from the minute the clouds cleared up, goes through the time-lapse, then shows the total eclipse in real time. The telescope tracking got really confused during the eclipse, requiring heavy stabilization, including some manual keyframe work. I'm sure there are many better videos of the eclipse out there, but this video is mine! The immense significance of this video is that it depicts what my eyes have actually seen. Unforgetable. Truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience...

https://youtu.be/kSeaU_0vcW4

I had several serious issues with my new and only once-tested Seestar:

Just when the clouds cleared up and it was about 20 minutes to todality, I suddenly could not connect to the Seestar. Had to reboot both phone and Seestar to connect.
The tracking was confused and frequently moved, also it failed to consider keeping the missing sun in the center, so the frame moved through different phases.
I shot 1s time lapse up to 6m before totality, and the resulting video was completely unusable, jumping between each frame. I had to heavily stabilize it in post, which took hours of work.
I decided to leave it on autoexposure so I can concentrate on watching the totality, we only got 1 minute of it, so I just needed to remove the filter and put it back in time. However the autoexposure was really bad before and after totality, overexposing the sun all the time when it was partially eclipsed. Only almost full sun was exposed correctly. So most of the sun in my video is white. However during the totality it paid of, doing a very decent job without my involvement other than removing and replacing the filter.

All that said, the video is priceless, because that is what we seen with out own eyes. And it didn't fail, found the sun and didn't ever completely lose tracking. So I'll take what I can get. There was only a single chance in my lifetime to capture this, and it didn't fail, which is a big thing...

Daemn42

Nice vid. It's likely that the auto exposure was pretty much doing what it was meant to do, as it can't do anything but look at the relative percentage of dark vs light and adjust as appropriate, which will overexpose the sun the more the moon covers it. That's why they gave us manual exposure options. I switched to manual, and slid the sliders almost all the way to left (like 0 and 3) and that gave me a nice deep orange sun with the sunspots visible the entire time.

Yes, the visual object tracking is pretty annoying. It makes constant adjustments, in potentially every direction, and that'd be fine if it weren't for the huge gear lash, so every time it drives left it loads up one side of the gear teeth, then when it reverses to track normally, it now in the gap in the gear lash so the object starts to drift right on its own in frame. Seeing this, it speeds up to move the object back to center.. then it slowly drifts over time due to non-precise tracking, and at some point decides it needs to go left.. rinse/repeat.. The overall tracking is actually smoother if you disable the visual object tracking, but then it will very slowly drift out of frame over time due to imprecision in the compass and level calibration.

Roman Lando

Daemn42 I kind of expected the autoexposure thing, but I decided that my priority is fiddling with any settings during totality. And it did work in that respect. I only removed solar filter (installed into the 3D-printed solar finder so really easy to remove and put back without any force).

I listed the issues in case the devs would want to modify the autoexposure algorithm. They could make it so it exposes for the brightest part of the image, and not the average brightness value. Basically, expose for highlights. That's doable and will solve the problem for lunar and solar mode.