Four months in the can

Can almost four months have already passed? Can it be the solstice? Can you remember when this all began? Can it, Chuckbert! Can we just get to the story?

Happy Summer Solstice, 2009!

Way back on February 28, I posted a little teaser where I showed pictures of some cans I put on the roof but didn't say what they were doing there. Izzy's guess about what was going on was pretty much correct. (Maybe it wasn't a guess. Maybe she knew but left it vague so not to spoil the surprise.)

The cans were pinhole cameras. Each had some Ilford photographic paper in it and a hole in its side. After I took the pictures of the cans I removed the tape covering their pinholes and just left them. Today I went up there, put some tape over their pinholes and brought them in to "process."

The processing is very simple. I just put the paper on my scanner's glass and scanned. No chemicals! No Costco 1-hour photo! Just scanning and tweaking with image editing software.

The whole point of this exercise was to watch the sun's progress through the months. We get to see the sun rise higher in the sky as the days go by. At least when there are no clouds. We get to see May Gray and June Gloom very well.

Here is the scene that the paint can strapped to south side of the chimney screen saw:
The sun was behind clouds where there are gaps in the white stripes.

I put the holes in the middles of the cans. That ended up getting a lot of the foreground but cut off the top of the sun's arcs. In this picture you can see the new solar powered attic fan and Solatube we had installed last year.

It's interesting how the sun shows through gaps between leaves of the ash tree even when it has fully leafed out. (The bottom trails of the sun go through the tree before it got all of its leaves.)

Here's a normal camera's view of that direction (though not nearly as wide angle):

This next picture is from the can on the east side of the chimney. The sun goes through an ash tree on the left and over another ash on the right. That's the same tree on the left side of the first picture above. You can see the Solatube on the roof of the garage.

This is the normal view showing the garage roof and the left hand ash tree from above.

This is the picture taken by the Guinness can strapped to the tripod of the weather station. This picture shows our May Gray and June Gloom pretty well. The sun's trails at the top of the arc got pretty sparse. We've had a very gloomy couple of months. The sun didn't make an appearance all day today.

This picture is from a Guinness can on an angled leg of the weather station's tripod. I set it up a few weeks after the others on the Spring Equinox. It's looking higher in the sky and a bit to the west of the other Guinness can. I'm not sure why there aren't many trails in the morning side of the picture. Maybe the paper inside the can wasn't right up against the can and shaded the sun.

This is the view from the tripod. That's the ash that the sun goes over.

I've put the paint cans and a Guinness can back up there. I am taking pictures from the Summer Solstice to the Winter Solstice. That's the longest exposure that you would want to take. You don't want to have a solstice in the middle of an exposure since you'd just get the sun retracing its path as it changes direction.

These new cameras have their pinholes higher so that they'll get more of the sky and less of the ground. The sky's the point of these pictures after all. But the foreground does make them more interesting. I wonder why the Guinness cans don't show any detail on the ground. Maybe they need bigger pinholes.

I made up four other Guinness cans. I'll have to figure out where to put them.

I learned about this technique from an Astronomy Picture of the Day. It's got links to sites that explain how you, too, can make solargraphs!