Joe Ipsilanti's blog: Eclipse 20.03.2015

While I’m trying to make time-lapse (it is taking a lot of time) here are some photos of the last eclipse.

It was my first experience of shooting the Sun and particular the eclipse. Therefore I wasn’t assured that all the equipment choused correctly. A lot of time I spent making calculations, but finally it proved to be correct.

Shooting was made on Kenko MIL TOL 400mm F6.7 ED lens with 2x teleconverter and Olympus OM-D E-M1 camera. In this way I’ve got 1600mm of equivalent focal length, which provided almost complete coverage of the sensor by the circle of the Sun. More precisely, the coverage was not full and took rather a quarter of the sensor, but this is the ideal approach because circle constantly walks due to the natural movement of the Sun and on a larger scale it would be difficult to keep always in sight.

Also I needed to suppress the light flux up to 13 stops of exposure in order to the Sun was not a blinding, but a pleasant yellow circle. For this task I used a combination of HOYA PRO ND1000 and HOYA PRO ND8 filters. The result was excellent.

Olympus E-M1 + Kenko MIL TOL 400mm F6.7 ED + HOYA PRO ND1000 + HOYA PRO ND8

Actually I was late and almost had no enough time for necessary preparations (to calibrate and test equipment, accurate aim on focus etc.). Therefore, the sharpness could get worse than it is possible. But for the first time the result is perfect I think. With an extra crop can be seen even sunspots.

A little more shots.