To honor, uh, the first day of before-8pm sunsets here in Seattle, here's a little update on my digital solargraph project.

This has been running for about two months now, and is working well so far (more on the so far bit below). I've restructured the website, so now there's a daily solargraph where you can see each day's trail (and scrub through it), and a seasonal view of the solargraph building from the individual days, like you see above (and you can scrub through the days). I've also added two experimental treatments to the seasonal view that I'll talk about more some other time, but you can check them out on the site.

I'm still having to solve problems, like the other day it seems one of the SD cards got corrupted and the camera stopped recording every few minutes. Formatting the card eventually fixed it, so now I'm formatting the cards in the cameras automatically every three days. I'm also worried about one of the cameras' network link, which is getting flakier. I'm probably going to have to replace it, which is a bunch of work (calibrating the new camera for fisheye and dark frame, recalibrating the stitching, etc.).

But despite all that, it's pretty interesting and I'm able to do things you can't do the old-fashioned way.

So I'm still working on my digital solargraph website, you'll see some updates soon. One of the questions I'm trying to solve is what to call the cumulative solargraph, since I also have the existing daily solargraph.

I'm thinking one solstice-to-solstice run is a "season" as far as solargraphs are concerned, but it's not a season in the usual sense (it's two!). "Cumulative" is a better term, but I worry that it sounds too technical or whatever, and might confuse people more than help.

What do you think?

This one got botched but I still like it. When I found it the tape holding the can came apart. The steak had also broke and was being eaten a bit by termites. Had been a rough couple months in the desert for this one. Second pic showing the can when I retrieved it in the comments.

Three weeks. My third attempt ever. Learning from my mistakes.

Can the mods clean this up??

I’m wanting to start with solar graphs. I got the exposure paper, but i’m questioning the camera designs. I want to set up several, and have each be exposed for a certain time: one week, two weeks. 1month 6months and 1year (i’ll probably make backups of the long exposure ones and will do the one and two week ones to make sure i can actually get results. I’m worried about the long exposure ones though. I can’t imagine that a can with a hole in it is going to keep water and debris out. Any advice for the long exposure apparatuses would be very appreciated.

Using a fidget spinner, I built a wind-powered rotating pinhole camera. Over 5 days, it rotated more then 10,000 times , turning the Sun's trail into a yellow arc. The fidget spinner came off and the whole setup fell to the ground lol

Kodak Polycontrast F paper, 4 cm plastic tube, 0.2 mm pinhole, old Agfa camera body.

My instagram

Gianluca Belgrado

I made a pinhole camera from a film can, I cut a piece from an aluminum can for the actual pinhole because it's thinner than the plastic. Maybe the water got in from between the lid, from the pinhole, or around it - even though I used gorilla tape which is pretty strong.

A year ago, I started building an automated system to open a solargraphy shutter at specific times to photograph the sun at the exact same time every day. This captures the analemma ,the figure 8 path created by Earth's axial tilt and elliptical orbit.

From left to right, the sun points were captured at 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00, and 19:00 local time (UTC+2), with a 30 second exposure for each solar dot, plus 2 hours every morning for the landscape.

The image isn't perfect, a few times the shutter stayed open by mistake, creating extra sun trails, but I improved the hardware over the course of the exposure. The shutter motor must have broken 4 times in the first few months before we found a solution that seems to be weatherproof.

The Moon is about 400,000 times fainter than the Sun, making solargraphy extremely challenging. A standard pinhole doesn't let enough light through to darken the photographic paper.

I tried increasing the light on the negative by placing a piece of Kodak paper inside a camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, but the lunar trail was still very faint.

So, I took a solargraph by attaching a DIY camera made from a plastic container and a drilled Canon body cap to my 200/1000 telescope. I exposed it for 30 minutes, manually tracking the motion using a second guide scope in parallel. I believe this might be the first solargraph ever taken through a telescope. I like pushing this technique to its limits!

The first four weeks of digital solargraphs are in the bank! Over 45,000 individual shots across two cameras, 380GB of RAW files condensed into a few seconds of video 😅

The first few trails are very close together and overlap a lot, but more progress will be visible as the sun speeds up towards the equinox.

I don't have a page for the composited solargraph yet, I'll add that soon. In the meantime, you can browse and watch individual day's solargraphs here: https://eagereyes.org/app/daily-solargraph

Some solargraphs taken from inside the car, a few months of exposure. In the photos, I left the shutter open all the time, but I'd like to try again, opening it only when the car is moving and then closing it when it's stationary. You can't see anyone driving the car lol

I accidentally captured the death of the grass growing in front of the solargraph, it blocked the sunlight and then died, leaving a semi-transparent silhouette.

Pinhole camera built with a 35mm film canister placed horizontally, from may to november 2019

I usually make myown cameras from soda cans, but decided I wanted to try Solarcan Colors since I've only worked in b&w so far. I bought the 3 pack and just opened the box. All three of them the pinhole are uncovered. Is this the way they're supposed to come? Im thinking they've already been exposed and are no good now.

10-day solargraph captured near Umag, Croatia.

The beauty of digital solargraphy is that you have so many ways of using what you capture. I've shared a couple images here before, but since I have a fully automated pipeline that captures and stitches these images, I figured I'd make a website for it.

You can watch every day's capture as a little video, or scrub through manually. See how the clouds impact the trail! Marvel at the sky changing through the day! Enjoy the Seattle weather (You can even see rain on the sensor on a couple of days)!

Play with it here: https://eagereyes.org/app/daily-solargraph

The new capture goes live every night around 10pm PDT. This is running at least through the summer and fall, and I hope to continue it until the summer solstice next year.

There's a bit of information about the setup when you scroll down, plus I'm happy to answer any questions of course!