This beautiful video shows three years in the life of the Sun in three minutes. The photographs are shown at a pace of two photos for each day. Thus, there are a little over 2000 photos in this video that are shown at around 12 frames per second.
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If flashlights can be solar and mechanically powered, why can’t digital cameras? Turns out they can. Superheadz Japan has launched a new digital camera called the “Sun & Cloud.” It’s the world’s first digital camera that’s capable of generating its own power so that you don’t need to constantly be worrying about battery drain and recharging.
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Alan Friedman of Buffalo, New York is an amateur astrophotography enthusiast who captures amazing photographs of the Sun through a telescope in his backyard. His highly detailed photographs show the sun in ways you never see with your naked eye. Using special filters that allow the photos to be captured without destroying his camera or his eyes, Friedman creates images of our life-giving star that look more like something you might see under a microscope.
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If you want to snap a photograph of the sun (perhaps during an eclipse) without burning your camera sensor, one quick way is to make a dark filter using an unwanted floppy disk (remember those?). You’ll need to carefully harvest the black magnetic film inside the disk and slice out a piece to cover your lens with. Two words of warning: don’t crease the film, lest you make it unusable, and don’t use the filter with your human eyes.
Floppy Disk Sun Filter [Instructables]
There was a much-hyped transit of Venus yesterday in which Venus appeared as a small black circle moving across the face of the sun. This rare phenomenon occurs in pairs of eight years separated by more than a century: the previous transit was in 2004, but the next one won’t occur until 2117. If you missed out, don’t worry — there’s a boatload of beautiful photos and videos out there that can give you an even better view than what your eyes would have seen. The amazing high-definition video above was created using images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.
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Want a challenging photography project? Try capturing an analemma in a single shot. “Analemma” is the name given to the figure-eight shape traced by the sun if photographed at the same time of day over the course of a year. To capture it, you’ll need to leave your camera in a fixed position and shoot photos at exactly the same time of day for all of the shots.
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To capture “portraits of the sun” and to illustrate its power, General Electric filled 20 weather balloons with hydrogen and helium, surrounded them with 24 Canon DSLR cameras (18 7Ds and 6 60Ds), and shot the balloons exploding Matrix-style.
(via Laughing Squid)
What if you could keep your camera charged all day while shooting outdoors using the power of the sun? That’s the idea behind this conceptual camera strap designed by Weng Jie. The solar panels built into the strap harvest energy from the sun beating down on your neck as you’re shooting away.
Many cameras would need to specifically allow for this strap, but do you think this idea is feasible?
(via Yanko Design)
