Lieutenant Colonel Ross Franquemont took a stunning image of an eclipse, taken from U-2 airplane. This stunner won Air Space Magazine’s Astronomy Photo Contest. Franquemont detailed the process and planning he had done to take that image:
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Because of all the planning done by so many different people, I was fairly confident I could put the U-2 in the correct spot to see the eclipse.
The orbit was an elongated north-south orbit that was perpendicular to the path of the eclipse. I had never seen an eclipse from an aircraft personally, and had to try to imagine what I wanted to do. I knew I would only have minutes, so the cameras would have to be set up ahead of time. The only camera I held was a Nikon D810 that I borrowed from our public affairs office.
Going through my wide-angle camera confirmed that I did get a lot of shots of the inside of the cockpit during the main event. After landing, I avoided people because everyone wanted to look at my photos. I told them I would need to put them on my computer first.
I went home and started downloading everything onto my 2010 iMac. I use Lightroom CC, and to my pleased surprise, when I brought the exposure way up on the RAW files for those 30 black shots, there were three that actually had some corona on them. They wouldn’t be the corona shot of the century but they were still recognizable as a corona. When I brought the exposure up on what looked like just a blip of sunlight, it showed the whole corona to make a diamond ring shot. In the end, I found that I actually had captured basically each stage of the eclipse. That was when I decided to put them all together in one picture and build a composite of the eclipse.
image credit : Ross Franquemont via Air Space Magazine
Source: neatorama