10/24/2023
This is a portrait of the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun, captured in a sequence of images taken from the rim of Bryce Canyon, Utah, from sunrise until nearly the end of the eclipse before noon local time.
This is a composite blend of unfiltered exposures taken at sunrise for the landscape lit by the rising Sun, and for the dawn sky. Those were taken and blended as a vertical panorama to include the background sky and the landscape looking down to the canyon and river flowing from what is known as the Tropic Ditch, an irrigation channel.
I cover how I shot and processed this image in the latest edition of my ebook How to Photograph the Solar Eclipses, available at https://www.amazingsky.com/EclipseBook
But here are some TECH DETAILS:
Onto the base panorama of the ground and sky I layered in 66 filtered images of the Sun, as it rose into the morning sky, and with the Moon moving across its disk over nearly 3 hours, reaching mid-eclipse at about 10:29 local MDT at upper right. It then appears as a ring, or annulus of light for one frame. Annularity lasted 3 minutes at this site, which was well south of the eclipse path centreline.
The camera was aimed and framed at sunrise to include the upper part of the landscape and the amount of sky I knew the Sun would move across over the morning. The camera was not moved after sunrise, nor was the focal length changed. The Sun disks are the correct actual size and the Sun's motion accurate for the scene.
The site was the Ruby's Inn Overlook on private land behind the hotels at Bryce Canyon City, and open to hotel guests on eclipse morning. The site had the advantage of providing a great vista while allowing me to set up this camera, plus my telescope and telephoto lens with their cameras (used for other close-up shots), all close together near the car. That allowed me to keep an eye on all the gear and not haul heavy scope equipment far. Plus this site was not as busy as the main Park viewpoints would have been.
The Suns were selected from a total of 600 images, from a set shot every 1 minute, in an exposure-bracketed set of three images taken at every minute. But only one frame from every third set was used, so the images are separated by an interval of 3 minutes, just enough to keep the disks separate.
Some high cirrus clouds drifted through before mid-eclipse, adding a slight glow to a few of the Suns.
The lens was the Canon RF15-35mm at 24mm and f/5.6 on the Canon Ra camera at ISO 100, with exposures varying from 1/640 to 1/200 second (longer for the mid-eclipse frames). The solar filter was the KASE ND100000 Revolution filter, an 82mm threaded filter with a magnetic snap-on design.
All blending and layering in Photoshop with a mild Orton glow added with Luminar Neo.
The World at Night - TWAN Bryce Canyon National Park
