Video of my Egypt/Libya eclipse viewing tour

[shetline]

I have no idea how many of you can view this at once before my web hosting service balks at the bandwidth, but here you are anyway -- we'll see how it goes:

http://www.shetline.com/movies/egypt_libya_2006.mov

It's a 15-minute video, 46.9 MB, and requires a bandwith of about 450 kbps to stream smoothly.

The video is basically a fast-paced slide show (most images aren't shown any longer than one second) with some (I think) pretty cool music, with a couple of short snippets of actual motion video thrown in. I've hopefully made it more entertaining to watch than the average slide show -- I guess all of you can judge how successful I was. :)

This is my first major iMovie project, and the DVD I created from it was my first iDVD project (not counting a never-finished transfer of an old laserdisc to DVD I attempted once). I have to say, while there a good things to say about iMovie and iDVD, I'm a bit disappointed really. Both pieces of software have a lot of bugs which cost me a lot of time redoing the same work a couple of times over. The Apple reputation for quality isn't exactly shining through on these products -- but I'll leave my bitching about that to subsequent posts, if not a separate thread in a different forum like Mac OS or General Discussion.

[BRussell]

Looks like a great trip.

[curiousuburb]

Cool.

Great pictures, loved the Burroughs audio. Not enough eclipse stuff, but still awesome.

Nice diamond ring shots, and some excellent prominences at 10 and 11 o'clock.

Was it purely camera, or what scope did you shoot through?

semi-OT: my local astronomy society site here in N. Ireland uses SkyViewCafe links for Galilean moon position, and a few of our members were in Turkey for the most recent eclipse (with some similarly spiffy photos)... mind if I share the link with them?

[shetline]

It's after putting together something like this that I find myself thinking of all of the pictures I wish I'd taken, but didn't! For one thing, that camp site was very crowded and busy most of the time, but it looks like a ghost town in most of my shots. There were fireworks at night, and local dancers performing -- none of which I got pictures of.

All I had for taking eclipse pictures was my Canon PowerShot S2 IS. At maximum optical zoom (12x) that made the diameter of the sun/moon disc about 300 pixels -- so not much high detail was possible, and color refraction set in with that much magnification done using lenses and not mirrors for magnification.

I like taking my own eclipse pictures just to have some pictures which I can call my own, if you know what I mean, but I'll leave the fine eclipse photography to the people who don't seem to mind hauling a massive heap of photographic and telescopic equipment all over northern Africa -- that sure isn't me. :)

My traveling companion -- my ex wife, actually -- is the one who took the diamond ring shot. My camera was all set up on a tripod, ready to do the pre-totality shots with a solar filter in place, and then to switch quickly over to totality corona photos by sliding off the filter and turning one knob. I couldn't mess with more than that and actually watch the eclipse.

A total eclipse is too awesome an experience to let yourself miss out on it by getting lost in messing with photographic equipment instead. I set things up so that the picture taking to an absolute minimum of my attention. Now that I've seen two total solar eclipse, maybe when I see my third eclipse I'll let picture taking taking a little higher priority. :)

With my camera on the tripod, I couldn't get crowd shots, people-reaction shots, and all of that. Kind of wish now that my ex had taken some of those shots, or that I'd taken a small second camera along.

By the way... how is the streaming video working out for you guys? I wanted to go for fairly high res video, so I hope it's working out okay and not lagging and sputtering a lot.

And, yes... go ahead and share the link. If my bandwidth usage goes haywire, I'll just delete the file or rename it. :)