Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Kitt Peak Green Flash

Okay, I was up at Kitt Peak on Friday (posted some night pics a couple of days ago) and took a nice burst of Sunset pictures trying to capture the elusive green flash. In reality, you can capture several small green flashes as the Sun sets behind a jagged mountain.

This video is 36 frames taken in burst mode with a Canon Digital Rebel Xti using a 55-250mm EFS lens at f/5.6. I cropped the pics and put them together into a short video (the colors in the original are better...maybe I can figure out how to optimize if for youtube sometime). Each picture is up for 1 second so this is slowed down compared to real life. As the Sun sets, you can see a series of small green flashes as the Sun disappears behind the mountain.


Visually we saw one green flash. The photographs reveal that we really saw a series of small, quick flashes that our eyes perceived as one.

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.

2 comments:

OrbsCorbs said...

Sorry, I didn't see it/them, but I have bad eyes.

hale-bopp said...

These are small and tougher to see. Youtube did not preserve the colors well when it converted the video (the original pics look better...I'll figure out how to fix that someday).

You have to look close just as the Sun goes down for little specs of green, usually at the edges of the Sun in this case.