Stalking the Wily Analemma

avi33 writes "Wired has an article on the short list of photographers seeking to capture a shot of the analemma - the sun's figure-eight-shaped declination in the sky over the course of a year. Only a handful of people are known to have done this, and of course the obstacles are many: maintaining the equipment and its positioning, the finicky nature of film, the weather, and the photographer's persistence. Is it just me, or is this crying out for digital automation? Mount a cam to a hardpoint, have it snap a shot every x hours, and overlay them? Why I bet some of you could do this with a perl script in an afternoon. There's a shortage of photos from outside the northern hemisphere, so get busy."

Comments

YEAR!

[dave_f1m]

Did the submitter read what he wrote? It needs to be over a year. And the people doing it on film would not consider doing it with a digital and software to be an achievement. Kinda takes all the challenge out of it.

Missing the whole point

[wowbagger]

The whole point of an analemma is to do it on 1 piece of film - no fair taking multiple shots and compositing.

Sure, taking the picture itself can easily be automated.

But fixing a camera to a location so that it will not move DAMMIT (relative to the earth, that is), so that it won't get covered in snow/leaves/pigeondoo/..., so that the film won't be ruined by being out in the elements for a year, being in a location where you can reasonably count on having clear skies enough of the time to get the shots (a month of clouds will really screw you up), being able to judge the exposure needed for the sun shots without overexposing the film, then getting the final exposure (to get the background) right....

That takes a lot of skill that you are not going to be easily able to compress into a Perl script.

Re:Missing the whole point

[javaxman]

Sorry, I think the whole idea of "analog film is better" is a little silly. Not without it's merits, of course, but... at some point, there's a difference between science and art.

If you're interested in the science, a set of digital photos of reasonably high quality which are then composited are just as good as a single piece of film.

If you're looking at it from an art point of view, and more the 'art of photography' view rather than the 'look at this nice-looking picture' view, well, then maybe you want the one bit of film, so you can get the 'true nature' of the subject and appreciate the 'artists skill'.

But, in the long run, the digitally composited photo is _still_ by definition a photo of an analemma, and can be just as pretty ( maybe prettier ) than it's analog component.

Submitter is tres-lame

[brunes69]

Your computer can also re-produce Beethoven's 9th, "perfectly", as many times as you want.

That is not the same an orchestra performing it.

Some things are just cooler in analong.

Huh?

[PrvtBurrito]

Did anyone else read that as "analenema"?

Re:Yawn

[eingram]

Like this? I did that in a few minutes.

I wonder how it's possible to check a digital image to see if it's real or not. I just took an existing analemma and overlayed a random landscape on top of it (which is similar to what is done on film, I think).

Re:Good to see they did't misspell my name.

[Billy the Mountain]

There was an eclipse in 1978, I think. Did your photo happen to get part of that as well? Come to think of it, that would make an interesting analemma where you plan for a solar eclipse (even a partial one) to be part of it.

BTM

Re:Good to see they did't misspell my name.

[RobertB-DC]

As the editor of Sky & Telescope magazine during 1978-79...

I can't believe this has been modded up.

Exhibit 1: Slashdot user name "schoolsucks" and is proud of his new PS2, yet claims to have been an editor for a major scientific publication 25 years ago.

Exhibit 2: Does this look like the work of an editor for a major publication?

Exhibit 3: -1, Troll

OTOH, I almost thought it was cool enough to put him on my Friends list, so he had me going for a while, too...

Re:Yawn

[NanoGator]

"I wonder how it's possible to check a digital image to see if it's real or not."

I can see the extra JPG compression on the landscape versus the analemma.

Re:Neat

[angst_ridden_hipster]

I've done a bunch of digital timelapse. Clouds are some of the best stuff, although pictures of flowers opening or groups of people doing different activities (parties, paying bills, etc) are amusing. I tend to do timelapse with frame capture rates between 20 seconds and 5 minutes.

Some of them are online.

Oh, boy, am I asking for a slashdotting? This is being hosted on a 300 MHz K7 on a 768 kilobit DSL line. I'll play it conservatively: just search google for webbwerks and timelapse. That should cut down the traffic a bit.

'Scuse me, I'm going to go and pray now.

Burn out the CCD

[Wade Tregaskis]

Of course, you wouldn't want to take repeated photographs of the sun with a digital camera, because you'll invariably burn the CCD out pretty quickly.

TV station towercams probably have the data

[davidwr]

Many TV stations have "towercams" and they routinely get sunrises and sunsets for the weather.

If any stations bothered to aim in the same direction every day at the same time, and keep the tapes, the raw data exists for an animation loop.

Superimposing the stills and adjusting the exposure will give you the photograph.

Sure, it's not as challenging, but it's still a sight to behold.