BTS - Sunset With Sunspots

Here's a behind the scenes photo from when I was shooting the sunset the other day. The little blue box on top of the telescope is the camera, a monochrome camera with a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels.

I sat in the shadow beneath the stand to better see the computer screen and be able to monitor the recording. In this picture, I've embedded a actual screenshot from the original movie onto the computer screen to give you a fell of how it looked.

As you can see, the camera was somewhat tilted and not aligned to the horizon, so that has been corrected in post production. Also, since using a diagonal mirror on the telescope, the Sun is moving in the "wrong" direction in the recorded material, so that also needed to be fixed. The last thing I did was to add a yellowish color to the Sun to make it look like we're used to see the Sun.

The original movie is 17 minutes long and shows the entire sunset. In the final movie I've just used 5 minutes where the Sun is passing behind the radar tower and speeded the movie up 5 times to save you guys some time :-)