Another Eclipse Animation, and Some Video
Another large animation, this one showing partial phases of the eclipsed sun:
I'm not entirely happy with this .gif -- there's too much tilt of the axis of encroachment due to the camera angle, and had I been conscientious about it, I would have taken regularly spaced partial photographs rather than on the whimsical I in fact followed. And a really conscientious photographer would have taken partial phases on the backside of totality, between third contact and fourth, a time when we had already started editing pictures for upload.
I'm a lot more happy with the video, as I've edited it to bypass all the time the tripod spent betraying my finely-woven schemes and skip straight to the big finish. You'll be able to see the middle corona (though video compression has pixellated some of the coronal structure), and then the ending diamond ring. You also get to hear the reaction of the crowd to the eclipse, including me talking to myself as I try to shoot the last few pictures. I think I cut out all my coarse language, though.
If you have Flash 7, you can see the video on YouTube. There's also a copy at Megaupload.com. The YouTube version is a 60 MB MPEG and the downloadable is a 1 MB .wmv -- I'll leave it up to you to decide which is better -- and both are just under 1 minute. I hope you enjoy it!
I'm still working on compositing the totality shots. Must learn to mask . . .