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Why is the sun moving so fast in this solar eclipse video?


myname

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I must have watched 100's of videos on the recent solar eclipse but only this one shows the sun and moon move very quickly midway through this video. Why is this? Would appreciate any insight. Thanks.

 

 

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That's a particularly bad video. The eclipse took over four minutes here and it wasn't even a total. That whole clip runs only two and half. So I have to assume they time-lapsed the boring bit when everything was just dark. You can try the National Geographic video on You Tube.

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Posted (edited)

No. There is no time lapse. You can clearly see the sun dropping south east and the person filming is describing what he is seeing.

Edited by myname
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Why is the sun moving so fast in this solar eclipse video?

Clouds are moving in the foreground, which gives the impression that the sun is moving..

 

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There’s no fixed reference, so how can you say the sun is moving at all? Or are you referring to the green crescent, which is due to an internal reflection in the lens? That moves because the camera is moving.

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25 minutes ago, Sensei said:

Clouds are moving in the foreground, which gives the impression that the sun is moving..

I agree. 

 

1 hour ago, myname said:

You can clearly see the sun dropping south east

Modern equipment (hardware and software, phones for instance) may have image and video stabilisation. So the impression @Sensei mentions might be enhanced if the clouds are kept stable by the hardware/software so that the sun looks like it's moving quick.

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18 hours ago, Sensei said:

Clouds are moving in the foreground, which gives the impression that the sun is moving..

 

Then how to you explain the initial slow movement followed by rapid movement? Clouds don't move that way. Additionally, this event likely filmed in the millions does not show the movement captured in this video.

17 hours ago, Ghideon said:

I agree. 

 

Modern equipment (hardware and software, phones for instance) may have image and video stabilisation. So the impression @Sensei mentions might be enhanced if the clouds are kept stable by the hardware/software so that the sun looks like it's moving quick.

That explains nothing. Watch the video. The movement starts out slow then a sudden rapid movement south east. The equipment used to film this phenomenon is irrelevant in this context.

17 hours ago, swansont said:

There’s no fixed reference, so how can you say the sun is moving at all? Or are you referring to the green crescent, which is due to an internal reflection in the lens? That moves because the camera is moving.

No. I am talking about the sun itself which appears to be moving south east later in the video. It starts out moving quite slow then suddenly starts moving much faster. You can see the eclipse itself at about :36 moving very slow. suddenly the sun itself appears without the eclipse, looks a lot larger and is moving much faster. Watch the whole video and you will notice all of this which is unusual compared to other eclipse videos I have watched.

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4 hours ago, myname said:

Then how to you explain the initial slow movement followed by rapid movement? Clouds don't move that way. Additionally, this event likely filmed in the millions does not show the movement captured in this video.

That explains nothing. Watch the video. The movement starts out slow then a sudden rapid movement south east. The equipment used to film this phenomenon is irrelevant in this context.

No. I am talking about the sun itself which appears to be moving south east later in the video. It starts out moving quite slow then suddenly starts moving much faster. You can see the eclipse itself at about :36 moving very slow. suddenly the sun itself appears without the eclipse, looks a lot larger and is moving much faster. Watch the whole video and you will notice all of this which is unusual compared to other eclipse videos I have watched.

As others have pointed out it's a terrible video. Pointing a camera straight at the sun with no filter is a lousy way to see an eclipse - all you get a bright splodge.

As to your (strangely naïve) question, you can measure the speed of motion of the clouds, relative to the zone of maximum brightness, by comparing its position with 2 clear areas in the cloud. At 0:05 there is a clear area above the zone of max brightness and one below and a bit left of it. On my screen, these areas have moved ~5cm relative to the zone of max brightness by the 1:05 mark, i.e the clouds are moving at 5cm/min relative to the sun, on my screen. 

The magnification (zoom) of the camera also changes. On my screen these two clear areas are 2cm apart at the start of the video, 4cm apart at 0:13, 6cm apart at 0:15 and 10cm apart at 0:44, indicating an increase in magnification from 1 to 2 to 3 and finally to 5x. So at 5x, the rate of apparent motion of the clouds will be 25cm/min, i.e. ~4mm/sec. Later he zooms in even more, leading to an even  faster rate. But he's holding the camera unsteadily and tends to keep it trained on the clouds, rather than fixing it on a stand so that it points steadily at one point in the sky, where the sun is. So that makes it look as if it is the sun that is "moving" diagonally down and right, whereas in reality it is the clouds that are moving up and left.

And obviously, if you magnify the image by 5X or more, the rate of relative motion, of clouds w.r.t sun, will increase 5x or more too.

So there is nothing strange going on here. As with the credulous stories some of us have seen previously of spontaneous combustion, or people being strangled by their own thymus glands, a bit of analysis is all one needs to make sense of it. 

 

      

Edited by exchemist
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4 hours ago, myname said:

That explains nothing. Watch the video. The movement starts out slow then a sudden rapid movement south east. The equipment used to film this phenomenon is irrelevant in this context.

Ok. The sun's apparent motion across the sky is due to the earth's rotation. That means that a sudden shift in velocity of the suns movement requires the earth rotation to suddenly change. No such change in earth rotation was observed during the eclipse. It would have been a rather cataclysmic event. So the equipment and how it was used is relevant if you want to know how the video looks the way it does.

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