I Accidentally Photographed Something Unknown During the Eclipse - Smarter Every Day 298

You'll notice this video does not have a sponsor. I made it with Patreon support, and I'm super grateful to everyone who supports at www.patreon.com/smartereveryday ! Thank you! If you're a Patron, please be looking for a special post on Patreon for all paid members. I'm going to give you a copy of the photo... and a way to get a printout if you'd like. I had the photo rescanned on a special drum scanner.... so the file itself for this single photo is well over a gigabyte. Be on the lookout for this post! If you're able to figure out the satellite I'm super interested to know what you think! Thank you! Destin

Love the reaction from Dr. Telepun. Great job getting that shot!!

17:00 - I should've had two cameras going so I could've kept my video rolling! But I was there for the experience; the ability to catch a satellite's transit and compare footage was just serendipity. It was so amazing meeting you and Dr. Telepun in southern MO!

That photo could definitely win an award. Amazing effort level to time this perfectly, on that day, in that location. This needs to be in a museum. For real.

Great job Destin! I'm a 68 year old, old timer, x-photographer, Brooks Institute of Photography 1979 Grad. I've done a lot of muti-exposure photography work including creating graphics and special effects by doing dozens of exposures on a single piece of film. It's so exciting to get it right and you nailed it. There is so much you can do with digital photography but getting back to the basics of film can be so exciting. Good luck to you man.

Fascinating… and what’s more, your obvious enthusiasm was infectious.

It’s fun to think that there may have been a satellite taking a photo of me at my camera tripod.

Nothing warms my heart more then seeing people with genuine, undying, enthusiasm, baked straight into their marrow, their being... It's incredibly inspiring.

Man… I ditched work and pulled the kids out of school to run down and catch the eclipse in large part due to your insistence that I wouldn’t regret it. Boy. Tears come to my eyes reliving the moment of totality in your video. I’ll be forever grateful to you for giving me that experience with my dad and kids. Thanks 🙏🏼

You may have seen a satellite that you're not supposed to know about! Lol

man, a big old nerd looking at your picture with magnification goggles and a magnifying glass saying "this is the best work i've ever seen" is surely something

You are so right when you say that things are enjoyable when people are enjoying it. The professor's excitement was a pleasure to be a part of

Seeing your and Dr. Telepun's enthusiasm was really heartwarming, and seeing when your photo and Geerling's synched up almost gave me chills.

Wow! It was great to be a part of creating such a great image and memory. There was so many technical things that could have gone wrong - from accurate enough exposures for slide film, to development, to shutter speed consistency and movement of the camera, that the idea felt a bit unachievable in the beginning. Great to see it turn out this well 😍

21:24 I’m a geek and watching the doctors’ reaction to seeing it is kinda emotional. You can hear in his voice that he felt emotional when he saw that. Incredible.

Thanks for posting this. I'm 81 now, and all my life I have had this same abundance of joy whenever I learn something new, try something I have not done before, or experiencing one of the many goals I imagined doing at some point in my life.

Film photographer here. You did great, more than great. Using medium format was a good option. I would have had to pull one of my sheet film cameras out of storage to do it, but that option was good as well considering where we are with lot's of film tech disappearing. There's not many of us left anymore. Sometimes I just pull one of my TLR cameras out and play with it just to look at a real images on the ground glass with my own eyeballs, it's so inspiring.

Honest to goodness, this may be my favorite video you've ever done. Featuring so many people with a sense of wonder, curiosity and the desire to share scientific discovery and knowledge is a true testament to the positive impact science can have. Congrats on nailing the photo and kudos for sharing the wonder and passion of the solar eclipse with the whole community!

The fact that this may be the only photo taken like this in 30 years shows how special of a photograph it is. This is so cool

I have this theory about why the reduced light during an total eclipse looks so creepy. Normally, to get that dark, the sun is just below the horizon and any light remaining is reddened by the atmosphere. The light during a total eclipse is just greyer than usual, maybe with some extra blue from the rest of the sky. The colour seems all wrong.  I noticed the same sort of thing the first time I used an LED lamp on a dimmer. It does not get redder at low power, the way a tungsten lamp would. I've seen several partials and two total eclipses, but last April's was the first one I'd seen the "shadow bands" in.