2017 Total Solar Eclipse Shadow



On Aug 21, 2017 I set up my  Brinno TLC200Pro time-lapse-camera to record the passing shadow of the total solar eclipse as it moved over my location in Kearney Nebraska.

Instead of pointing my camera at the sun, I pointed the camera north-northwest which was the direction of the shadow's approach.  The camera ran automatically while I spent my time with family and new friends, watching the total eclipse using our solar glasses.

Technical Details
 The camera was set to record one frame per second for the entire 3 hour event. When the recording is finished the Brinno takes the individual frames and stitches them together into an AVI file. The AVI file setting was 20 frames per second.  The result was a 9 minute video of the full eclipse from just before first contact to just after last contact.

The Math
3 hours = 10800 seconds = 10800 individual frames.
10800 frames / 20 frames per second = 540 seconds.
540 seconds = 9 minutes.

Description
Rather than post a nine minute video for this blog entry I snipped out a 50 second portion of the total eclipse using the open source video editing software Shotcut.

At the start of this video you can see the odd greenish light that appear before totality. Then, during totality some street lights come on for a short period of time and all around the horizon appears to be a strange sunrise. After the shadow has passed over, the color of the sunlight returns to normal.

The final result is not the greatest eclipse related video ever captured, but it was just an interesting experiment that ran automatically while we all enjoyed the total solar eclipse.