Eye vs Camera: Why it's nearly impossible to film an eclipse

Hey everyone! it's been nearly a month since the eclipse and I'm FINALLY ready to publish my timelapse - you'll see why it took so long in this video... I set up two cameras and did an extremely crude high dynamic range stack that is able to resolve some detail on the sunlit moon, and some detail on the shadowed moon, simultaneously. I wish I'd taken 6 pictures at once, and that they were easy to align, so that I could have a full lograithmic-ish HDR picture, but for now, this is my best eclipse timelapse yet. I hope you like it!

Short version:

Music in this video:

[AlphaPhoenixChannel]

Corrections, comments, and clarifications:
1) First comment - go check out reddit.com/r/trytryagain! I made a community post a while back and got a lot of support for the idea, and this was the most popular name by far, so here it is! And I'm REALLY looking forward to seeing more projects iterating along!
2) A bunch of people have asked if the camera had lens stabilization on and I regret to inform you that you're totally right. in retrospect this was something that I'd wondered if I messed up but didn't check until actually writing this comment - wouldn't have helped me while I was stabilizing but now it makes me feel dumb lol... Speaks to the need for proper testing, and having a checklist more exhaustive than you think you need... Granted I was also wiping dew off the lenses every 2 minutes for the first hour or so of the total eclipse, and still relatively high frequency after that, so I was certainly adding jitter manually...
3) I've had a few people ask for just the timelapse, so I'll throw that up as a standalone 4k clip - hopefully the compression doesn't hit it too hard!

[MrZed]

The fact that you did the entire processing by hand, started making the video, and then "tried tried again" and just wrote the code anyways is why you are one of the great channels of YouTube.

[SeanHodgins]

I think a lot of photographers get a harsh reality check the first time they go out to photograph the moon. Don't even get me started on night time-lapses and condensation!

[MrQuickLine]

I appreciated that you included the famous constellation Sub Scribica

[kasuha]

You don't post videos often but every time you do, it's worth the wait. Thank you for all your hard work, both your results and the effort you put into them are fascinating.

[andrewmattern]

Elated whenever you post. Always something really neat. Looking forward to watching.

[matiastripaldi]

"there can be a perception that everything always works... when that is literally, never the case". that's so true, no matter what you apply it to. I'm currently doing an internship in a molecular biology lab and I gotta tell you, the number of times we've gone through the full procedure from getting a gene sequence, to putting it into a plasmid, to getting that into a bacteria, etc etc, just to find out at the end that the whole process had failed and we had to adjust something, it really mind boggles you that we've learned as much as we have in just a couple thousand years. Stuff goes wrong and that's just how it is. Great video as always

[matthiaswandel]

A thousand times dimmer would actually be only 1/30th of the pixel value because the camera's gamma is going to be at least 2. Which is to say, pixel value is brightness raised to one over gamma. So at one thousandths of the brightness, the pixels would not be all zero.

[andrewparker]

This really just goes to show how incredible the dynamic range of the human eye is

[Vaaaaadim]

It always did strike me as strange that in videos of a lunar eclipse, the moon would suddenly be brighter when it's fully in the earth's shadow.
But I never stopped and thought about it, your explanation that cameras (and our eyes) automatically adjust to make it more visible makes sense.

I applaud the effort that you put into this video. I don't personally know enough / have enough experience with image stabilization to have implemented what you did (or it would take me way longer).
That being said, there will always be a trade-off between quantity and quality, and I think there is diminishing returns if we go too far on the quality side. You said that you are inclined to improve the quality of your videos given the higher amount of subscribers you have, and so these videos take longer. I think it would be okay for you to scale it back a bit to ultimately share more knowledge.
But these are just some thoughts from someone who barely has any experience making videos! If you think your process is fine, then keep at it and I'll keep enjoying the videos :)

[antimatterhorn]

i think our vision also benefits from the fact that we stitch a lot of separate images together to form our "view", so to speak. our eyes jump around extremely fast and our pupil contracts and dilates during all of those saccades, so that we have a more or less even contrast ratio across our entire visual field.

[MikeDC]

I love seeing the failures and hope you continue to highlight them on your channel. A similar channel that comes to mind is Cody's Lab. I think it's far more satisfying to see the entire process with all it's challenges and failures. Not knowing if or how you will come to a conclusion can be a lot more thought provoking than just a clean cut science channel that gives you all the facts like it's a simple process with no surprises.

[henryginn]

Personally I love the long unplanned tangent projects you end up doing en route to a finished product, it's part of that makes this channel amazing. Tbh, I'm shocked you managed to do all of this in a month since the eclipse

[CaseyConnor]

Great work! I make a hyper-local calendar for my area and wrote some custom code to plot the phase of the moon on it... in generating that curve (using data from elsewhere) I noticed a very slight wobble in the curve; I thought it was a drawing bug at first, but it turned out to be due to the same effect you described: the vantage point of the observer on earth changing as the earth rotated. Neat stuff!

[mikoajp.]

Clarification: You were NOT filming the moon lighted by a scattered ring of *sunset*. Moon is lit by sunset on one side, sunrise on the other, and - given when it was filmed - two areas of polar twilight.

[thorntontarr]

Throughout this video I knew that you were about to bang your head against that "perfectionist" perspective that you have. You did display the classic "devil in the details" issue that plagues a great experimenter. I applaud your honesty regarding how much personal time gets 'trashed' as one struggles to reach perfection. We are so fortunate to have access to your work.

[ryanfav]

Been through all that myself, 437 3 image brackets that needed to be manually aligned as I did not have a capable enough mount at the time, all for a 30 second 4K video clip, a few minutes of extra planning could have saved me hours in post, very jealous of the software,

[mathyou]

"So instead, I did it by hand."

Wow! That is definitely a labor of love!

[F_L_U_X]

15:15 we love and appreciate you, brother. Take your time and put your heart and passion into it and it will always be an enjoyable experience together.

[onradioactivewaves]

What a spectacular video. In my opinion, the numerous "failures" actually made it more interesting than just having a perfect video to watch, and really showcased just how much time, research, effort and planning went into this endeavor.