During the 2024 total solar eclipse, I captured something I
haven't been able to identify. See if you can see it. [Other people talking] Coming out. <Destin in Background> Oh, Bailey's Beads!
<Dr. Telepun> Diamond Ring! [Other people cheering in the background]
<Lady Squeeling> "WHEEWWW!" [Destin] Did you see it? Let's back it up and play it again. Focus on this band of the sky right here. What is this? And what is this? we're going to talk about this later. This video is about something I love, and so I don't feel any pressure to make a
video that will perform for the algorithm. I'm just going to tell you a story about a thing that happened to me,
and it's something I love. So by now, we're about a month after
the total solar eclipse here in America. And a lot of people are uploading their videos, and people have been asking me,
Hey, what did you do for the eclipse? And I haven't been able to tell anybody
what I did because it has taken until now. It's 10:00 PM, about a month later, I just now figured out if I succeeded
or failed with the thing I tried to do. And it's really fun,
and I want to tell you what I did. Okay, so let me take you back. A long time ago, a guy named Dr. Gordon Telepun told me I would love total
solar eclipses, and I kinda didn't believe him. This is going away
from you and to the side. It's unbelievable.
I saw him in 2002. But I took his word on it,
and I totally fell in love with it. In fact, in 2017, I did the math with a friend named Trevor,
and we decided to go to Wyoming to try to capture the International Space Station
transiting the total solar eclipse. But at that point, the most technical shot I had ever done with photography,
and we got it. Two, one, transit.
Oh, it happened. I saw it. I totally saw it. Tara and I fell in love with total solar eclipses so much that two years later
in 2019, we went to Argentina and we filmed that solar eclipse,
and we just got to experience it in the middle of the desert
overlooking the Andes Mountains. My favorite shot of that eclipse in 2019 was this composite of a bunch
of different digital photos that I took. I had strung them all together and laid
them over the same image, and you can see the solar eclipse
setting over the Andes Mountains. I love that shot.
It's a composite. It's got multiple images in the same
image, and I did that with Photoshop. We love that photo. So when we realized there was going to be
a total solar eclipse in 2024, Tara had the idea, We've got
to watch an eclipse with Dr. Telepun He's the one that gave us
this love of this thing. It would be amazing to see
him see a total solar eclipse. So we decided to meet him
and his wife for lunch. And then Dr. Telepun said something that seemed so impossible to me, but it combined all the
different technical things that I love. So color positive film? Yeah, just regular ectachrome,
whatever they used to call it back then. You want about six before? You don't want too many. Then we'll take a corona shot and we'll do about six after on the same piece of slide
film like they used to do a long time ago. It would be really cool. To be clear, this is what Dr. Telepun was asking me to do. He said, you could do what you did
on the Andy's shot where you stitched it all together with a digital
camera in Photoshop. But what if you did it
on one piece of film? Film is unforgiving. You get one shot at it, and then you have to develop it,
and whatever happens, happens. So he was proposing that I put film
in the camera, and then I aim at the eclipse, and then
I put my filter on in the partial phases. I take a photo like that, and then I do that every 10 minutes or so,
and then I take the filter off, I get totality, and then
I put that back on, right? The problem is most cameras
will advance the film. When you take a photo,
it's rolling the film to the next shot. So you have to get a special camera that won't roll the film,
and we're going to get all of that light exposure on one piece of film,
which means we get one chance to focus, one chance to take 20 something shots,
and then one chance to develop it. So the risk is incredibly high, but you could get a really,
really cool photo, probably the most technically difficult
photo I've ever taken in my entire life. So that was the challenge. So I started trying to find cameras
that that you could take this photo and not advance the film,
and I couldn't find one. I could not figure out a way to take a photo without moving the film and then
taking a photo again, because every time you reset the shutter,
it would try to advance. So what I needed was a camera with multi-shot mode,
and I had no idea where to find it. So as it got closer and closer to the Eclipse time, I realized I wasn't
going to be able to figure this out. So I called my friends at the kamera
store in Finland, Youhoe and Niko. These are my buddies. I sent them this long email,
and they said, You know what? You go to sleep because we're in Finland.
We're going to still be awake. We will figure something out, and then
we will email you something tomorrow. And when they did,
I opened my email and they had a video of Niko explaining everything
that I needed to do. I put together what I think
should work for your needs. Mami RZ67 Pro. And he explained everything
about how to do it. So about a week out from the Eclipse,
I set up the solar tracker for the video camera and the still camera
that my son was going to run. Dr. Telapeen and I started trying
to figure out the RZ67. All right, seven minutes. That's it.
Wow. That's fun, isn't it?
That's nice. Yeah, it's really fun. One of the things I love about Dr. Telepun is he genuinely loves things,
and he's unapologetic about it. He loves eclipses,
and he wants you to love eclipses. The night before the eclipse,
when we arrived in Jackson, Missouri, it was just very clear that he wanted
everyone to have a great experience. So Dr.
Telapeen has my two youngest. First of all, he's teaching
them how to graph things. They're going to be graphing the temperature during the eclipse,
and it is adorable. This is where the eclipse
is going to start. Another cool thing about this
is I got to take my family. My brother came my mother-in-law, my dad. We played some Mario Kart
the night before. It was just good family time. You're going to try to beat Papa, Omi,
and Mommy. All right. The morning of the Eclipse, Dr. Telepun started setting up his stations, just like the educational video
that we made before the Eclipse. He brought it all and he set it up, and kids started walking up,
and he started explaining it. He was in teacher mode the whole time.
He loved people. He wanted to share everything. His son and my son
started working together. His son started teaching my son
how to take these photos. And so my son started taking photos with a tracker mount,
and I just got to focus on the film. Dr.
Talebun asked my daughter to run this specific experiment and show people that
they could see the eclipse indirectly. She did a great job with that,
and I'm very proud of her. So we had a line of cameras and tripods. We're all looking at the sun,
and we're using Dr. Telepun Solar eclipse timer, and we're getting ready for C1, first
contact when the moon touches the sun. Five, four, three, two, one. That's first contact. A couple of minutes later, it was time
for the first photo of our sequence. Thirty seconds.
This was the moment of truth. Once I set this camera in position,
you can't move it. So I locked everything down as hard as I could, and I was quite scared
that I was going to bump it. But once you commit to this first photo,
you can't move anything. Three, two, one, zero. All right, now we got eight minutes. One of the things I messed up in Argentina
in 2019 is I just randomly took photos, and so my photos are not
spaced out correctly. Dr. Telepun did the math with his app
to tell me exactly when to take photos. So every so often, we were very strict about taking
that photo down to the second if we could so that we get the spacing
on the photo just right. And one thing that was funny is you had
all this fancy electronic equipment, people tracker, amounts, all this stuff,
computerized, whatever you have you. And I'm out there with this
big box film camera. Three, two, One, take. As the crescent of the sun got smaller and smaller, the sharp and fuzzy
shadows experiment started to show up. The light got really
eerie and icky feeling. It feels so gross. Everyone's got it. Doesn't this feel gross? Like the light feel pukey to you guys?
Yeah. I took some 3D wiggle grams
with this Nashika film camera. It takes four images at once. If you put them together, you can get
a 3D effect on film, which is awesome. As we got close to totality, Dr. Telepun's childlike joy
started to come out. Before I knew it, I heard the call out for shadow bands,
which means we're almost at totality. Oh, shadow bands.
Look at that. Are they happening?
Yeah. Oh, they're happening.
30 seconds. Hands on filters. I saw shadow bands with my eyes,
but I couldn't get them on camera. They were too faint. But the most important
thing is I got to see Dr. Telepun see shadow bands. And then, totality happened,
and it was awesome. Holy cow.
Oh, wow. [Telepun] Look at Venus. Dude.
Oh, diamond ring. [Destin] When do we shoot the shot? [Telepun] Let's wait a little bit.
Wait a little bit. Oh, look at Venus.
[D] That's so good. [T] Look at Jupiter. [D] Did you get the shots, brother?
I got a lot of them. Just shoot of them.
I got to go kiss my wife. The beautiful thing about Totality being
four and a half minutes is I had plenty of time to take photos,
and I got to go give my wife a kiss. I like to kiss Tara during Totality.
It's a thing I love to do. I got to go say something to all the kids,
and I got to go try to get the shot. It felt really strange at the moment taking that exposure, knowing
that there were 10 shots ahead of it. I'm just hoping that I got the exposure right on the shutter speed,
because with totality, you have to guess. All right, here we go. Wow. I'm going to do 60. I got it. Before I knew it, people were
talking about the sun coming back. [people in the crowd] Coming out. Oh, baby. The tiny face. Oh, wow. Oh, It comes back fast. [T] You got even four
minutes and nine seconds. It's too fast.
[D] It is, isn't it? [T] I can't wait for Egypt. [D] After that, you just walk around and talk to people, and then we're waiting
for that next call out because remember, we've got more photos to take
in order to get this sequence shot. Okay, so we have done 11
exposures on this one piece of film. What's about to happen is my daughter is
going to take the last picture, right? 30 seconds. And this is the last photo, correct?
Last one. Okay. All right, hit it. Great. Great job. Okay, the dark slide is in. And the photo should be in this. And it's going to take
weeks to figure it out. On the way back from Missouri, my dad
drove and it started raining like crazy. Crazy, which made me even more
grateful that we got to see this. I started looking at all the photos and videos, and I looked at my son's
photos, and he got some amazing shots, and I'm super happy that he's going to
have shots from this eclipse that he took. I think that's really neat. If you remember, he was
running a tracker mount. He was taking photos, but this camera
over here was shooting 4K video. When I started looking at this footage,
I wanted to see C2 and C3, Bailey's beads, around the edges of the mountains
of the moon, right? So I started looking at it, and then I realized there is something
flying across the sky, like right at C3. It could be a bug, it could be a plane,
or it could be a satellite. Five seconds after the sun comes back, look at the right side of the
screen just as the lady yells. [other people yelling] Oh, baby, she. You already did it. [D] Did you see it? I'll rewind it and we can watch it again. Look at the right side of the screen. This time, I'll put an arrow
up so you can see it. Baby, she. What's even more interesting is another one happens immediately after this,
except this one's on the solar disk. How do we figure out
if this is a satellite? Now, the cool thing is once the sun started coming out, that's when
you started to see the bugs. During totality,
I couldn't see bugs flying around, and I'm assuming that's their
backlit wings and stuff like that. It's a very difficult problem. So I went to the smartest
satellite person I know. I follow him online. His name is Jonathan McDowell. He runs planet4589.org which is a delightful old-school website that's just pure
satellite information. Jonathan is awesome,
and he knows what he's talking about. I started by showing him the video
and asking for his gut reaction. [J] real-time?
[D] It's real-time, yes. [J] Okay.
I think that's a bug. [D] Okay.
Tell me why. [J] I Think it's going too fast. [D] Okay.
[J] I mean, it's not impossible. I guess I wasn't thinking about
how zoomed in that image is. [D] Then Then I asked how Jonathan would do the math to figure out if it was
traveling at orbital velocities. [J] We can figure out the angular velocity
of this little thing as it crosses your field of view, because
we know how big the sun is. The sun is about half a degree across,
and it took about half a second. Let's suppose that this is
a few hundred kilometers away. Let's say 500 kilometers away. Let's see if I divide 500 by 60. That's about eight kilometers a second.
[D] Okay. [J] It's not very different from the 7. 8 kilometers a second
of a low-orbiting satellite. And so that is not inconsistent with the speed of a satellite going
overhead. So the fact that we can't rule out that it was a satellite, It doesn't mean it was
for sure a satellite, but it's intriguing. [D] It's fun, yeah.
[J] Yeah, it's fun. So it's possible that it was. So if this was a bug, it would be just
above my camera fluttering around, right? But if it's a satellite,
it'll be way up in the sky. So one One way to test to see if it was a satellite or something,
at least at satellite altitudes, is to see if anybody in my area
of operation there saw the same thing. And there just happened to be
a YouTuber set up at my same location. I met him earlier that day,
and you might recognize this guy. So this is Jeff Geerling.
Jeff Geerling has a YouTube channel. And what's the name
of your YouTube channel? [J] Jeff Geerling.
[D] Yeah, it is. My son and I set the camera up here to the north, and Jeff's camera
was down here to the south. We were about 130 meters apart. Just after C3, I saw
something fly by the sun. The question is,
is it a bug or a satellite? That's the question. [J] I saw it in your video, and it does
look like a satellite going like that. [D] So we looked at Jeff's raw footage, and
there were a lot more bugs flying around. Also, it was difficult to synchronize his
footage to mind in time because at one point, he cut his camera
off to take photos. Is it okay if I use this
to try to figure this out? [J] Oh, definitely. If people want to check out your
YouTube channel, where do they go? [J] Jeff Geerling. [D] There you go. G-e-e-r-l-i-n-g, correct? [J] Yeah, you got it. You didn't spell it Girling like a lot
of people do. [D] There you go.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Jeff.
I really appreciate it. And I will go compare these videos
and see what I can come up with. There were three main differences in the camera footage,
and I corrected it all in Adobe Premiere. Jeff's camera was more
sensitive than mine. His was filmed at a different angle than mine, so I indexed off of Bayly's beads to
make sure they were at the same rotation. And then I was more zoomed in,
so I adjusted the scale. And once I got everything lined up,
this is what you see. Okay, I think I've got it to where
it's about as clear as it can be. So here's Jeff's footage right here on the left,
and I can turn it on and off like that. And you can see I've indexed the sun
on the prominences right there on that spot in that spot,
so I can turn it on and off like that. So if I make this big... Okay, so you got Jeff's footage
on the left, you have mine on the right. That's the object as it enters
Jeff's of view. This is the object as it enters mine. If I step through, look at that. It's there. Look at that. It's in both of our views. We're about 100 yards away. So if the the solar disk is about half
a degree, it looks like ours is a 10th of a degree offset,
the object in his versus my frame. That can't be a bug, right? If we're 100 yards apart, it can't be a bug in both of our
lenses unless the bugs at 100,000 feet. No, more than that. And so you can work all the geometry. This is workable. [inaudible background talk] We're going to call this a W. That's got to be a satellite
or something like it. In fact, I had another camera set up, and if you go to the right frames,
you can see the object is there as well. Even though this is a really wide angle, you can still see something zipped
by in a couple of different places. So I'm going to call this a win. We're going to call that satellite. My next question was, what satellite? I thought I had narrowed it down
to Starlink satellite 30323, but when I submitted the NORAD
category ID number 57634 to celestrack. Org and got the orbital data, sometimes called a two-line
element or a three-line element. I then gave that to a smart friend of mine with the ability to simulate all this
stuff, and it doesn't seem like Starlink I think 303-2-3 was close
enough at that exact moment. So here's the question, if it was a satellite, and I think it was,
what satellite was it? I think you have all
the information you need. You know where I was,
where I was pointing 5.5 seconds after C3,
so you know when it was. What satellite do you think this was? I know someone on the Internet
is smart enough to do this. Space Force, I'm just going to say it. You should use this as a challenge
for your young guardians learning orbital mechanics, and then give them
permission to tell us what they learned. I'm super curious about this, and I'm excited to see
where the answer comes from. All right, now it's time to check up on that piece of film we
shot to see what's in there. Okay, I'm driving to Indie Film Lab
right now, and I am terrified. Somebody could have bumped the tripod. I could have gotten
the shutter speed wrong. There's no way that we nailed this shot,
but I'm just going to go ahead and tell myself I'm excited to have
tried it because it was fun. All right, we're at Indie Film Lab.
Garret, Josh. Moment of truth.
[J] Lets see it. [G] Let's check it out.
[D] I don't think it's going to work, dude. [G] That's the shot. [D] Oh, dude. It's there. I can see it. I can see it. [G] That's so cool. [D] Oh, man. [G] Yeah, that's going to be cool. [D] It's going to work. [J] I love it. [D] Oh, man. Okay. That's so cool. Watching Garret and Josh put this slide film into the Noritsu scanner was
legitimately terrifying because I knew we were about to figure
out if it was in focus. Were the exposures the correct color? All the stuff. We were about to figure this out.
That's so cool. Dude, that looks crazy. That is so cool. So is it scanning it now? [G] Yeah, it's scanning it now. I just did a quick adjustments to it. [D] I really like Indie Film Lab, and I love the fact that they're doing
stuff here in Montgomery, Alabama. If you want your film scanned,
send it to indiefilm.com. These folks are awesome. Josh even took the print,
cropped it for me, and made a printout because we know
that there's one person in this world whose mind will be blown by this image,
and we've got to go show it to him. [T] Is that it?
[D] Which one? [T] That one? [D] Look at it. [T] Are you kidding me? How come it's... That's unbelievable.
Is that it? That's it.
That's the one we did? [D] That's it. [T] Nobody has done that for years. [D] Look at it, though.
Look really, can you see
really close? [T] Well, my eyesight is terrible. I need to get a magnifier. [D] Okay, go for it. [T] That's amazing. That's amazing. [D] I know, right? [T] This is the best one film
sequence that I've ever seen. [D] Yeah?
[T] I'm serious. The other ones I've seen,
and I can't find them again, they only took maybe four partials on each
side, and they had them spread out a lot. Doing 10 in a row,
and nailing it is unbelievable. [D] I didn't think we would get it, man. I'm going to level with you. I did not think we were going to get it.
[T] Oh, no. I knew we could do it. This is the way they used to do it.
[D] So check this out. Open that up. Yeah, right? [T] I I'm telling you, I don't know
the last time that that was done. I know, right?
It's got to be 30 years ago. [D] It was pretty fun, right? [T] Wow. [D] I didn't think we'd do that good. [T] You already printed it. You, wild man. You've been keeping me in suspense. [D] I did it today. The Indie Film Lab did it for us. Josh at Indy Film Lab printed it.
[T] Wow. I've always thought that interested
people are interesting. I heard that somewhere,
and I totally believe it to be true. Dr. Telepun is not only a good friend,
but he's an interesting character in this whole total solar eclipse
thing for my life. It was a blast to be able to watch
this with him and my family. It was great. I hope you enjoyed coming
along for the ride. Also, I'm just grateful that you're here. If you want to consider subscribing
to Smarter Every Day, that'd be awesome. If not, no big deal. I'm just glad that you're here.
That's it. I'm Destin.
You're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one.
Bye. If you support Smarter Every Day
at Patreon, first of all, you're awesome. Thank you. Secondly, be on the look out
for a post about this image. It took me a while to get the lighting
set up here because it's so glossy. But yeah, I want to share this with you. You help make it happen, and I'm grateful. So patreon.com/smartereveryday. I want to show you guys the picture. Oh, wow. That's so cool.
Wow. That's really cool. You guys took this as well. Okay. It's a group effort.
Thank you. Thank you very much for this.
I'm grateful.
