Glass Plate Pinhole Camera Records Sun’s Path Over a Year

Astrophotographer Ian Griffin captured this uncommon photograph of a photo voltaic analemma that charts the Solar’s path over a yr utilizing a pinhole digital camera with a 4×5 glass plate inside.

Analemmas present the place of the Solar within the sky from a set location on Earth. The trail appears completely different relying on the digital camera’s location however it’s all the time a determine eight.

Griffin tells PetaPixel that day-after-day for 12 months, as long as the solar was not obscured by clouds, he would open the pinhole digital camera’s shutter for 20 seconds at precisely 16:00.

“Contained in the digital camera was a single 4×5 inch glass plate coated with light-sensitive silver halide emulsion,” Griffin explains.

“The plate was a JD Lane ISO 2 plate made by an old-fashioned plate maker within the USA.”

Capturing from his dwelling in Portobello, New Zealand, Griffin mounted the digital camera going through west, and starting on September 23, 2021, he started the day by day routine of opening the shutter for 20 seconds.

“On the winter solstice and autumn equinox, I opened the shutter for longer to report the obvious movement of the solar throughout the sky,” Griffin provides.

Griffin shot day-after-day not figuring out for sure whether or not his photo voltaic photograph experiment was working and when he ended the mission this week he anxiously went right into a darkroom to see the outcomes.

“I dismounted the digital camera and took it to a makeshift darkroom within the laundry. Below purple gentle, I eliminated the plate popping it right into a chemical bathtub to develop the latent picture. After a couple of minutes, I shouted with delight. My yearlong mission to seize the photo voltaic analemma was profitable,” he says.

“The elongated determine eight curve you may see on this image is known as a photo voltaic analemma. The form of the analemma you see relies on your location, the lean of our planet’s axis, and Earth’s various pace across the Solar.”

Griffin believes that only a few analemma footage are taken from the southern hemispheres and ones taken on an antiqued photographic plate are even rarer.

The Solar’s analemmas isn’t the one one that may be captured, different planets have them too, notes SpaceWeather.

Not all are figure-of-eights both, the form relies on the lean of the planet’s spin axis and the eccentricity of its orbit across the solar, due to this fact completely different planets create completely different shapes. Martian analemmas, for instance, resemble a teardrop, whereas Jupiter’s is an oval form.

Extra of Griffin’s work could be discovered on his Instagram and Substack.

Picture credit: All photographs by Ian Griffin.