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Eclipse Photography
in the Digital Age
The potential of eclipse photography from the deck of a rolling ship is all
the more exciting when we consider the digital-processing techniques possible with todays home computers.
By Gerald L. Pellett
computers and digital processing is used
to extract detailed coronal structure from
these brief exposures.
A goal of my low-budget eclipse trip
to the Bolivian Andes in 1994 was to take
a range of exposures on 35-millimeter
slide film. I planned to use then-emerging image-processing techniques to
squeeze available detail from each slide
and create a composite view in which the
original range of exposures was compressed into a single image. Because I
planned to carry only a lightweight tripod with no motor drive, my exposures
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astro imaging
An original scan (upper left) of a 160 -second exposure is seen after processing with a 10 radial-blur filter (upper right). The blurred image
was used to process its corresponding original
image. The seven-image composite (left) melds
information captured in exposures of differing duration. It gives a visually realistic view,
while sacrificing detail shown in the other
frames with this article, which were combined by a separate method. The detailed operations of both techniques are explained in
the box below.
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discovered, however, that several conceptual and practical details are important
for successfully extracting coronal structure from the originals and retaining it
in the final composite. Furthermore, two
significantly different techniques were
discovered that produced notably different results. One maintained maximum
detail, while the other produced a visually-realistic image. With time and patience, anyone can perform either process with Photoshop and a desktop
computer.
In the midst of my project the March
1995 issue of Sky & Telescope arrived
containing Roger Ressmeyers computerprocessed image of the 1994 eclipse. He
also used Photoshop to combine six exposures ranging from 1 to 1500 second
that were obtained with a 600-mm telephoto lens and Fujichrome Provia 100
film. His final image file was 576
megabytes in size! He stated, At the beginning, I spent two hours with 1-megabyte images working out my approach,
then 18 hours compositing the final version. Although his method was not discussed, his composite appears similar to
my visually realistic example, but it also
displays some symmetric artifacts, which
I believe result from contrast and brightness enhancements of the composite
image.
Conceptually and operationally, my
processing techniques are quite simple.
Each of my slides was digitized with a
Leafscan 45 system attached to a 1993vintage Power Macintosh 8100. The ef-
fective resolution, after optical magnification, was about 2,200 dots per inch on
the original, which was more than adequate for extracting all the available information from my grainy slides. Each
slide was thus transformed into a 12megabyte TIFF file, which contained 8
bits (256 levels) of brightness information in red, green, and blue color channels. My processing was done with the
Macintosh and Photoshop 2.5 (later upgraded to version 3.0). Details of the
methods I used to manipulate and combine the individual exposures are given
in the box on page 118.
To produce a final image, the Moons
disk, which had become slightly brightened during processing, was handpainted using standard Photoshop tools.
The effects of compositing additional images are apparent in this sequence made with (left to right) 7, 10, and 15 originals. All were processed
with 10 radial-blur filters to increase contrast and visible detail.
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