Today, I announced my bid for Fort Collins City Council, in District 5 (the current councilmember, Kelly Ohlson, is term-limited). You can read all about it at http://www.rosscunniff.com - it should be a great adventure!
I got up this morning very early to make an animation of Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, the Moon, Venus, and Mercury as they rose in the early morning sky. Here is the finished product: It was very cold - 7 degrees Fahrenheight - and very early. This is a 30-minute sequence starting at 5:39 AM and finishing at 6:09 AM. All of the images have the same parameters: Canon 7DmkII camera Canon 8-15mm f/4L lens, locked at 10mm (widest useful zoom with this lens on a 1.6x crop camera) 8 second exposures at ISO 3200 Image sequencing performed by Canon's EOS Utility. A capture was started every 15 seconds. That camera/lens combo yields a 180-degree diagonal field-of-view. Jupiter and Mercury are about 120 degrees apart in these images, so this gives some extra room for animation and cropping. Capturing all five planets in the pre-dawn skyglow is surprisingly tricky, especially when city light pollution is contributing to a murky lower atmosphere. ...
I got two GoPro Hero3 Black cameras and am planning a panoramic project with them. However, to do the project correctly and accurately, I need a good read on their field-of-view. So, I set up a tripod and a grid and a tape measure, and took a few photos. Here they are, desaturated and contrast-enhanced, with central red dots and some annotations. First, measuring the diagonal FOV: Next, the horizontal FOV: Finally, the vertical FOV: The front of the camera lens was almost exactly 17 inches from the grid. The camera body started about 17.25 inches from the grid. Assuming the sensor is embedded some distance into the body, I used an estimated field-to-sensor distance of 17.5 inches. This yields the following field-of-view, in degrees: Diagonal: 146 Horizontal: 121 Vertical: 93 Doing a little interval math on the field-to-sensor distance shows these angles are accurate to about plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Int...
Like millions of other people, we went chasing the Great American Eclipse. We chose Nebraska, since everybody we knew was going to Wyoming, and the climate models suggested a good probability of clear weather. Our initial camp was at Lake McConaughy, which is just inside the line of totality. My sister Danielle and her husband Edward got there early to start scouting. Our plan was to check weather forecasts and then go mobile the day of the eclipse. The morning of August 19 I got up early and snapped this shot of the moon on its way to its date with destiny: Sunday morning we checked the forecasts. It was not looking good for Nebraska in general, but east-central Nebraska seemed better than western according to the forecasts. So we packed up camp and headed out to Camp Augustine, a Boy Scout camp near Grand Island, Nebraska: They had camping spots available, and a large field which would be good for observations. After a rather hot, muggy, sleepless night (dry camping wi...
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