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Thread: Capturing an eclipse

  1. #1
    Junior Member
    Join Date
    May 2012
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    Upstate New York
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    Capturing an eclipse

    With the solar eclipse on May 20 and the transit of Venus across the sun on June 5, I was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to safely capture these events without damaging an eye or a DSLR. Thanks.

  2. #2
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    Dec 2008
    Posts
    759
    ND filters are probably going to be the best suggestion, but i'll leave it up to others to say which values are the best.

    To avoid damaging your eyes, use live-view, but then you'll cook your sensor instead.
    With a canon EF mount lens on live-view, the camera will automatically stop-down the lens on live-view if there's too much light coming in (assuming the narrowest aperture is small enough). But with a manual lens via adapter you can set the aperture to smallest anyway, and if that's small enough then you can use it on live-view or viewfinder just the same.

    And for the hell of it, here's a shot I took last eclipse, January 2011, 7D, EF-s 15-85, 85mm, f/20, 1/4000s, iso100:
    Click image for larger version. 

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    I didn't have it at the time, but next time I would take this shot with my ND400 (9 stops), which would go down to f/5.6 (4 stops) and bring the shutter down to 1/125 (5 stops) (if my maths is correct).
    An awful lot of electrons were terribly inconvenienced in the making of this post.
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