Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, 2009

Six months have passed since we saw my first stab at solarography.  I took down the cameras at sunset the evening before the summer solstice, reloaded them with paper and put them back up in time to start recording some solstice-to-solstice pictures.

I made two cameras out of Guinness beer cans and two out of quart paint cans. The beer cans weren't terribly successful. The paper in both of them curled up and stopped taking their pictures. At least they got some of the sun's progress recorded.

This first picture is from a beer can that was strapped to the old clothesline pole. It isn't the full six months because I looked at it some time into the exposure and noticed that the paper had shifted over the pinhole. So I took it down and put up a second one in its place.

Here is June 20 through sometime before August 2 from the clothesline pole.

Here is a shot from the clothesline pole from August 3 till the paper curled and blocked the pinhole.

Here is the view from the weather station on the roof. Its paper curled so it didn't record much of the sun's progress. I'm really confused about how it got some of the sun early in the exposure then conked out completely for a long time then kicked in every now and then some time later. This is a mysterious picture.

I was amazed at the amount of detail that was seen in the foreground of the spring-summer pictures but was disappointed that the top part of the sun's path was cut off. When I put the cameras back on the roof for these pictures, I put the pinholes higher on the cans so they would record higher in the sky. That worked but now I have none of the roof showing. Oh, well.

Here is the view from the paint can that is facing southeast. It kind of looks like June Gloom persisted into July by the fuzzy trails in the higher passes of the sun in the mornings (on the left) but my weather station seems to say that we were gloomy only until about July 1. Maybe it's just that the edges of the pictures just don't record all that well.

And here is the view from the paint can that is facing southwest. The tree on the left is the tree on the right in the above picture.

(In case you happened to notice, I got some of my pictures' names wrong. The got the beer cans mixed up so their names are swapped.)