I Accidentally Photographed Something Unknown During the Eclipse - Smarter Every Day 298
During the 2024 total solar eclipse, I captured something I haven't been able to identify. See if you can see it.
[Other people talking] Coming out.
<Dr. Telepun> Diamond Ring!
[Other people cheering in the background]
[Destin] Did you see it? Let's back it up and play it again. Focus on this band of the sky right here. What is this? And what is this? We're going to talk about this later.
This video is about something I love, and so I don't feel any pressure to make a video that will perform for the algorithm. I'm just going to tell you a story about a thing that happened to me, and it's something I love. So by now, we're about a month after the total solar eclipse here in America. And a lot of people are uploading their videos, and people have been asking me, "Hey, what did you do for the eclipse?" And I haven't been able to tell anybody what I did because it has taken until now.
It's 10:00 PM, about a month later, I just now figured out if I succeeded or failed with the thing I tried to do. And it's really fun, and I want to tell you what I did. Okay, so let me take you back. A long time ago, a guy named Dr. Gordon Telepun told me I would love total solar eclipses, and I kinda didn't believe him. This is going away from you and to the side. It's unbelievable. I saw him in 2002. But I took his word on it, and I totally fell in love with it.
In fact, in 2017, I did the math with a friend named Trevor, and we decided to go to Wyoming to try to capture the International Space Station transiting the total solar eclipse. But at that point, the most technical shot I had ever done with photography, and we got it. Two, one, transit. Oh, it happened. I saw it. I totally saw it. Tara and I fell in love with total solar eclipses so much that two years later in 2019, we went to Argentina and we filmed that solar eclipse, and we just got to experience it in the middle of the desert overlooking the Andes Mountains.
My favorite shot of that eclipse in 2019 was this composite of a bunch of different digital photos that I took. I had strung them all together and laid them over the same image, and you can see the solar eclipse setting over the Andes Mountains. I love that shot. It's a composite. It's got multiple images in the same image, and I did that with Photoshop.
We love that photo. So when we realized there was going to be a total solar eclipse in 2024, Tara had the idea, "We've got to watch an eclipse with Dr. Telepun. He's the one that gave us this love of this thing. It would be amazing to see him see a total solar eclipse." So we decided to meet him and his wife for lunch.
And then Dr. Telepun said something that seemed so impossible to me, but it combined all the different technical things that I love. "So color positive film? Yeah, just regular ectachrome, whatever they used to call it back then. You want about six before? You don't want too many. Then we'll take a corona shot and we'll do about six after on the same piece of slide film like they used to do a long time ago. It would be really cool."
To be clear, this is what Dr. Telepun was asking me to do. He said, "You could do what you did on the Andes shot where you stitched it all together with a digital camera in Photoshop. But what if you did it on one piece of film?" Film is unforgiving. You get one shot at it, and then you have to develop it, and whatever happens, happens.
So he was proposing that I put film in the camera, and then I aim at the eclipse, and then I put my filter on in the partial phases. I take a photo like that, and then I do that every 10 minutes or so, and then I take the filter off, I get totality, and then I put that back on, right? The problem is most cameras will advance the film. When you take a photo, it's rolling the film to the next shot. So you have to get a special camera that won't roll the film, and we're going to get all of that light exposure on one piece of film, which means we get one chance to focus, one chance to take 20 something shots, and then one chance to develop it.
So the risk is incredibly high, but you could get a really, really cool photo, probably the most technically difficult photo I've ever taken in my entire life. So that was the challenge. So I started trying to find cameras that you could take this photo and not advance the film, and I couldn't find one.
I could not figure out a way to take a photo without moving the film and then taking a photo again, because every time you reset the shutter, it would try to advance. So what I needed was a camera with multi-shot mode, and I had no idea where to find it. So as it got closer and closer to the Eclipse time, I realized I wasn't going to be able to figure this out.
So I called my friends at the camera store in Finland, Youhoe and Niko. These are my buddies. I sent them this long email, and they said, "You know what? You go to sleep because we're in Finland. We're going to still be awake. We will figure something out, and then we will email you something tomorrow." And when they did, I opened my email and they had a video of Niko explaining everything that I needed to do.
"I put together what I think should work for your needs. Mami RZ67 Pro." And he explained everything about how to do it. So about a week out from the Eclipse, I set up the solar tracker for the video camera and the still camera that my son was going to run. Dr. Telepun and I started trying to figure out the RZ67.
"All right, seven minutes. That's it."
"Wow. That's fun, isn't it?"
"That's nice. Yeah, it's really fun."
One of the things I love about Dr. Telepun is he genuinely loves things, and he's unapologetic about it. He loves eclipses, and he wants you to love eclipses. The night before the eclipse, when we arrived in Jackson, Missouri, it was just very clear that he wanted everyone to have a great experience.
So Dr. Telepun has my two youngest. First of all, he's teaching them how to graph things. They're going to be graphing the temperature during the eclipse, and it is adorable. "This is where the eclipse is going to start."
Another cool thing about this is I got to take my family. My brother came, my mother-in-law, my dad. We played some Mario Kart the night before. It was just good family time. "You're going to try to beat Papa, Omi, and Mommy."
All right.
The morning of the Eclipse, Dr. Telepun started setting up his stations, just like the educational video that we made before the Eclipse. He brought it all and he set it up, and kids started walking up, and he started explaining it. He was in teacher mode the whole time. He loved people. He wanted to share everything.
His son and my son started working together. His son started teaching my son how to take these photos. And so my son started taking photos with a tracker mount, and I just got to focus on the film. Dr. Telepun asked my daughter to run this specific experiment and show people that they could see the eclipse indirectly. She did a great job with that, and I'm very proud of her.
So we had a line of cameras and tripods. We're all looking at the sun, and we're using Dr. Telepun's solar eclipse timer, and we're getting ready for C1, first contact when the moon touches the sun. "Five, four, three, two, one." That's first contact.
A couple of minutes later, it was time for the first photo of our sequence. "Thirty seconds." This was the moment of truth. Once I set this camera in position, you can't move it. So I locked everything down as hard as I could, and I was quite scared that I was going to bump it.
But once you commit to this first photo, you can't move anything. "Three, two, one, zero."
"All right, now we got eight minutes."
One of the things I messed up in Argentina in 2019 is I just randomly took photos, and so my photos are not spaced out correctly. Dr. Telepun did the math with his app to tell me exactly when to take photos. So every so often, we were very strict about taking that photo down to the second if we could so that we get the spacing on the photo just right.
And one thing that was funny is you had all this fancy electronic equipment, people tracker mounts, all this stuff, computerized, whatever you have you. And I'm out there with this big box film camera.
"Three, two, one, take."
As the crescent of the sun got smaller and smaller, the sharp and fuzzy shadows experiment started to show up. The light got really eerie and icky feeling. "It feels so gross. Everyone's got it. Doesn't this feel gross? Like the light feel pukey to you guys?"
Yeah. I took some 3D wiggle grams with this Nashika film camera. It takes four images at once. If you put them together, you can get a 3D effect on film, which is awesome.
As we got close to totality, Dr. Telepun's childlike joy started to come out. Before I knew it, I heard the call out for shadow bands, which means we're almost at totality.
"Oh, shadow bands. Look at that. Are they happening?"
"Yeah. Oh, they're happening."
"30 seconds. Hands on filters."
I saw shadow bands with my eyes, but I couldn't get them on camera. They were too faint. But the most important thing is I got to see Dr. Telepun see shadow bands. And then, totality happened, and it was awesome.
"Holy cow. Oh, wow."
"Oh, diamond ring."
[Destin] When do we shoot the shot?
"Oh, look at Venus."
"That's so good."
[Destin] Did you get the shots, brother?
"I got a lot of them."
"Just shoot of them. I got to go kiss my wife."
The beautiful thing about totality being four and a half minutes is I had plenty of time to take photos, and I got to go give my wife a kiss. I like to kiss Tara during totality. It's a thing I love to do.
I got to go say something to all the kids, and I got to go try to get the shot. It felt really strange at the moment taking that exposure, knowing that there were 10 shots ahead of it. I'm just hoping that I got the exposure right on the shutter speed, because with totality, you have to guess.
"All right, here we go. Wow. I'm going to do 60. I got it."
Before I knew it, people were talking about the sun coming back.
[people in the crowd] Coming out.
"Oh, baby. The tiny face."
"Oh, wow. Oh, it comes back fast."
"It's too fast."
[Destin] It is, isn't it?
After that, you just walk around and talk to people, and then we're waiting for that next call out because remember, we've got more photos to take in order to get this sequence shot.
"Okay, so we have done 11 exposures on this one piece of film. What's about to happen is my daughter is going to take the last picture, right?"
"30 seconds."
"And this is the last photo, correct?"
"Last one."
"Okay. All right, hit it. Great. Great job."
"Okay, the dark slide is in. And the photo should be in this. And it's going to take weeks to figure it out."
On the way back from Missouri, my dad drove and it started raining like crazy. Crazy, which made me even more grateful that we got to see this.
I started looking at all the photos and videos, and I looked at my son's photos, and he got some amazing shots, and I'm super happy that he's going to have shots from this eclipse that he took. I think that's really neat.
If you remember, he was running a tracker mount. He was taking photos, but this camera over here was shooting 4K video. When I started looking at this footage, I wanted to see C2 and C3, Bailey's beads, around the edges of the mountains of the moon, right?
So I started looking at it, and then I realized there is something flying across the sky, like right at C3. It could be a bug, it could be a plane, or it could be a satellite.
"Five seconds after the sun comes back, look at the right side of the screen just as the lady yells."
[other people yelling]
"Oh, baby, she. You already did it."
[Destin] Did you see it? I'll rewind it and we can watch it again. Look at the right side of the screen. This time, I'll put an arrow up so you can see it.
"Baby, she."
What's even more interesting is another one happens immediately after this, except this one's on the solar disk. How do we figure out if this is a satellite?
Now, the cool thing is once the sun started coming out, that's when you started to see the bugs. During totality, I couldn't see bugs flying around, and I'm assuming that's their backlit wings and stuff like that. It's a very difficult problem.
So I went to the smartest satellite person I know. I follow him online. His name is Jonathan McDowell. He runs planet4589.org, which is a delightful old-school website that's just pure satellite information. Jonathan is awesome, and he knows what he's talking about.
I started by showing him the video and asking for his gut reaction.
So one way to test to see if it was a satellite or something, at least at satellite altitudes, is to see if anybody in my area of operation there saw the same thing. And there just happened to be a YouTuber set up at my same location.
I met him earlier that day, and you might recognize this guy. So this is Jeff Geerling. Jeff Geerling has a YouTube channel. And what's the name of your YouTube channel?
The question is, is it a bug or a satellite? That's the question.
So we looked at Jeff's raw footage, and there were a lot more bugs flying around. Also, it was difficult to synchronize his footage to mine in time because at one point, he cut his camera off to take photos.
"Is it okay if I use this to try to figure this out?"
There were three main differences in the camera footage, and I corrected it all in Adobe Premiere. Jeff's camera was more sensitive than mine. His was filmed at a different angle than mine, so I indexed off of Bailey's beads to make sure they were at the same rotation.
And then I was more zoomed in, so I adjusted the scale. And once I got everything lined up, this is what you see.
"Okay, I think I've got it to where it's about as clear as it can be. So here's Jeff's footage right here on the left, and I can turn it on and off like that. And you can see I've indexed the sun on the prominences right there on that spot in that spot, so I can turn it on and off like that.
So if I make this big... Okay, so you got Jeff's footage on the left, you have mine on the right. That's the object as it enters Jeff's view. This is the object as it enters mine. If I step through, look at that. It's there. Look at that. It's in both of our views. We're about 100 yards away.
So if the solar disk is about half a degree, it looks like ours is a 10th of a degree offset, the object in his versus my frame. That can't be a bug, right?
If we're 100 yards apart, it can't be a bug in both of our lenses unless the bug's at 100,000 feet. No, more than that. And so you can work all the geometry. This is workable. [inaudible background talk] We're going to call this a W.
That's got to be a satellite or something like it. In fact, I had another camera set up, and if you go to the right frames, you can see the object is there as well. Even though this is a really wide angle, you can still see something zipped by in a couple of different places. So I'm going to call this a win.
We're going to call that satellite. My next question was, what satellite? I thought I had narrowed it down to Starlink satellite 30323, but when I submitted the NORAD category ID number 57634 to celestrak.org and got the orbital data, sometimes called a two-line element or a three-line element.
I then gave that to a smart friend of mine with the ability to simulate all this stuff, and it doesn't seem like Starlink. I think 303-2-3 was close enough at that exact moment. So here's the question: if it was a satellite, and I think it was, what satellite was it?
I think you have all the information you need. You know where I was, where I was pointing 5.5 seconds after C3, so you know when it was. What satellite do you think this was? I know someone on the Internet is smart enough to do this.
Space Force, I'm just going to say it. You should use this as a challenge for your young guardians learning orbital mechanics, and then give them permission to tell us what they learned. I'm super curious about this, and I'm excited to see where the answer comes from.
All right, now it's time to check up on that piece of film we shot to see what's in there.
Okay, I'm driving to Indie Film Lab right now, and I am terrified. Somebody could have bumped the tripod. I could have gotten the shutter speed wrong. There's no way that we nailed this shot, but I'm just going to go ahead and tell myself I'm excited to have tried it because it was fun.
All right, we're at Indie Film Lab. Garret, Josh. Moment of truth.
Watching Garret and Josh put this slide film into the Noritsu scanner was legitimately terrifying because I knew we were about to figure out if it was in focus. Were the exposures the correct color? All the stuff. We were about to figure this out.
"That's so cool. Dude, that looks crazy. That is so cool."
"So is it scanning it now?"
These folks are awesome. Josh even took the print, cropped it for me, and made a printout because we know that there's one person in this world whose mind will be blown by this image, and we've got to go show it to him.
"Is that it?"
"That's it."
"That's the one we did?"
"That's it."
"Yeah, right?"
"WOW."
I've always thought that interested people are interesting. I heard that somewhere, and I totally believe it to be true. Dr. Telepun is not only a good friend, but he's an interesting character in this whole total solar eclipse thing for my life.
It was a blast to be able to watch this with him and my family. It was great. I hope you enjoyed coming along for the ride. Also, I'm just grateful that you're here.
If you want to consider subscribing to Smarter Every Day, that'd be awesome. If not, no big deal. I'm just glad that you're here. That's it. I'm Destin. You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.
If you support Smarter Every Day at Patreon, first of all, you're awesome. Thank you. Secondly, be on the lookout for a post about this image. It took me a while to get the lighting set up here because it's so glossy. But yeah, I want to share this with you.
You help make it happen, and I'm grateful. So patreon.com/smartereveryday. I want to show you guys the picture.
"Oh, wow. That's so cool. Wow. That's really cool. You guys took this as well. Okay. It's a group effort. Thank you. Thank you very much for this. I'm grateful."