This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hey everyone, Nico here. This is part two in my
series on capturing the Analemma. The analemma is the path that the sun takes through the sky
if you photograph it from the same location at the same time every day throughout a year
the bad news is my initial plan has failed completely and I am starting over but the
good news is I think my new plan is much better and has already been a lot of fun to work on and
we'll get into it in this video and if you didn't see part one let me explain that this series is
not my traditional tutorials where I'm going to be really testing my methods carefully before sharing
them to make sure they work instead this series is a little bit more off the cuff and exploring
all my trial and error as I attempt to capture the analemma over the course of a year or more
and I welcome your advice uh the first video I got tons of great advice it was about planning
and stellarium and I found out that stellarium actually has a scripting feature in the ephemeris
tab that allows one to plot the whole analemma in the sky which is much easier than the way I was
doing it so keep up the helpful comments because I'm going to need them for a project like this one
so let's start with what my first plan was and why I realized it just wouldn't work my first
plan was to install this tripod in my yard here and then whenever I wanted to take a picture for
my analemma project I would go out into the yard attach the camera to this fixed tripod
and take the photo and what I liked about this plan is it seemed very simple I didn't have to
tie up a camera for the whole year I could use it for other things but my idea for how to avoid the
image shifting issue was to stake the tripod to the ground well here in New Hampshire we
get a pretty serious winter which is why you see signs everywhere warning you about Frost
heaves and buildings need serious foundations that go below the frost line and even then they
still can shift over time so I'm not sure why I thought I could get this lightweight tripod to
stay perfectly stable all year on just the ground even with Stakes but I did pursue this idea for
a while trying to make it work and I just gave up I was too frustrated with all the snow The Frozen
Ground so the tripod idea is dead now I do plan to put in some concrete piers in the yard this summer
and build an observatory around them so one idea I had was I could just put in an extra peer just
for the analemma project and with a pier you avoid the shifting ground issue because you dig out a
huge deep hole you fill it with concrete and that makes this really solid base for the pier to go on
um but I didn't quite like that idea because it would mean using a pier just for this project
because I wouldn't want to be taking the camera off and on and all that so
um I then started thinking is there some place within my house where I could permanently set up
the camera like in a windowsill and capture the whole thing from indoors and unfortunately there
was no such window that had the right view but then I realized this side of my house does have a
good view for the analemma so I made a very simple Mount from scrap wood that I had lying around so I
could attach the camera to the side of the house securely and here it is and this was a very good
proof of concept and it actually works just fine but then I realized I have another problem I don't
actually want to take the photo the camera in and out of the house every day at 11AM or noon during
daylight time because the more that I thought about it I was like you know I'm pretty forgetful
I have meetings I have travel I'm probably going to miss lots of potential days to capture the Sun
and on the one hand that might be fine because with an animal you don't need to actually capture
the Sun every day as long as you can get like 20 to 30 days throughout the year with hopefully at
least a couple days in every month then you're going to be able to see clearly the shape of
the analemma in your final photo there's space of course for all the cloudy days and days where you
just couldn't capture the Sun but on the other hand I realized for me personally I think I'm
going to have a much higher chance of success with this if I automate The Taking of the photos so my
first idea was to use an intervalometer this is basically just a little trigger with a clock in
it that can tell the camera take one picture every day but the main issue with this was I'm not sure
if an intervalometer like this is going to be accurate enough to take a photo every 24 hours
down to like the seconds level because if you're off by even like 30 seconds the position of the
sun is wrong and I'm sort of a perfectionist so and then another thing is this runs on batteries
I'd rather run everything off AC so I kept thinking and when I was looking through all my
junk I found this old Raspberry Pi 3 it was just a tiny little single board computer it runs Linux
and for Linux there's a program called G photo 2 where you can automate The Taking of your photos
with a camera connected to your computer and then the computer can pull down accurate time from the
internet so I think this is going to work but I do need power to both the Raspberry Pi power for
the DSLR that's not going to be a problem because there's an AC outlet there I do want everything
mounted outside here and I want to leave it there all year protected from the elements so I need to
build some kind of enclosure for this and at this point you might think I'm nuts because
this is really getting more and more complex and one of my goals was to keep it simple so
but I think that in the end I think all this added level of complexity is going to be worth it
um I'm still finalizing how I want the enclosure to work because I want to protect all this stuff
from the elements but it also needs to open up so I can make adjustments or change out a cable
if something goes wrong so I'm still thinking that all through if you have some ideas about
an enclosure for this let me know probably just going to use scrap wood but who knows let me just
close this video with a rundown of the equipment that I've settled on for this project in the front
of the lens we have a handmade solar filter this is made from butter Astro solar film and
cardboard and tape and this is what I use to make all of my white light solar filters it's
inexpensive it works great with a lens this wide you actually can shoot without a filter so why am
I using one well if you shoot the sun directly without a filter you have to stop down it looks
like this from the diffraction pattern if you shoot it with the solar filter you just get
this perfect white disc of the Sun and everything else goes black which is actually exactly what we
want for an analemma because then we can take all of those photos composite them together
with one unfiltered photo of the scene and then we have our final year-long exposure now one
thing I haven't decided on with the filter is if I'll use this one that I've already made for the
lens or once I make the enclosure if I'm going to use some kind of bigger front filter here
for the lens I am using a Rokinon 24 millimeter F 1.4 it's a manual lens I think I'll just be
able to set Focus once and leave it for the whole project for the camera I am using a stock Canon 5D
Mark II which is a pretty old camera that doesn't have video so I got a very good deal on it I used
the camera is not super important but I think that for the lenses that I wanted to use or the lens I
did want to use this broken down 24 I wanted full frame if you were using a crop sensor you would
need a wider lens to capture the analoma like 12 or 14 millimeters okay in terms of accessories I
have a dummy battery here for the Canon DSLR so it can run off an outlet I have I'm going to have a
USB cable going from the camera to this which is the Raspberry Pi model 3 you really can do this
with any small computer you know that can run a program to act as a trigger for your camera and
that's it I'm I'm still not quite underway but I'm getting very close here and again I welcome
all comments critiques suggestions I think my next video in the series is going to be an update on
the enclosure idea and hopefully first light with this project uh before I go I want to tell you a
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