 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hey everyone, Nico here. This is part two in my series on capturing the Anilemma. The Anilemma is the path that the sun takes through the sky if you photograph it from the same location at the same time every day throughout a year. The bad news is my initial plan has failed completely and I am starting over. But the good news is I think my new plan is much better and has already been a lot of fun to work on and we'll get into it in this video. And if you didn't see part one, let me explain that this series is not my traditional tutorials where I'm gonna be really testing my methods carefully before sharing them to make sure they work. Instead, this series is a little bit more off the cuff and exploring all my trial and error as I attempt to capture the Anilemma over the course of a year or more. And I welcome your advice. The first video I got tons of great advice. It was about planning and solarium and I found out that solarium actually has a scripting feature in the ephemera tab that allows one to plot the whole Anilemma in the sky which is much easier than the way I was doing it. So keep up the helpful comments because I'm going to need them for a project like this one. So let's start with what my first plan was and why I realized it just wouldn't work. My first plan was to install this tripod in my yard here and then whenever I wanted to take a picture for my Anilemma project, I would go out into the yard, attach the camera to this fixed tripod and take the photo. And what I liked about this plan is it seemed very simple. I didn't have to tie up a camera for the whole year. I could use it for other things but my idea for how to avoid the image shifting issue was to stake the tripod to the ground. Well, here in New Hampshire, we get a pretty serious winter which is why you see signs everywhere warning you about frost heaves and buildings need serious foundations that go below the frost line and even then they still can shift over time. So I'm not sure why I thought I could get this lightweight tripod to stay perfectly stable all year on just the ground even with stakes but I did pursue this idea for a while trying to make it work and I just gave up. I was too frustrated with all the snow, the frozen ground, so the tripod idea is dead. Now I do plan to put in some concrete piers in the yard this summer and build an observatory around them. So one idea I had was I could just put in an extra pier just for the Anilema project. And with a pier, you avoid the shifting ground issue because you dig out a huge deep hole, you fill it with concrete and that makes this really solid base for the pier to go on. But I didn't quite like that idea because it would mean using a pier just for this project because I wouldn't want to be taking the camera off and on and all of that. So I then started thinking, is there some place within my house where I could permanently set up the camera like in a window sill and capture the whole thing from indoors? And unfortunately there was no such window that had the right view. But then I realized this side of my house does have a good view for the Anilema. So I made a very simple mount from scrap wood that I had lying around so I could attach the camera to the side of the house securely. And here it is. And this was a very good proof of concept and it actually works just fine. But then I realized I have another problem. I don't actually want to take the camera in and out of the house every day at 11 a.m. or noon during daylight time because the more that I thought about it, I was like, you know, I'm pretty forgetful. I have meetings, I have travel. I'm probably gonna miss lots of potential days to capture the sun. And on the one hand, that might be fine because with Anilema, you don't need to actually capture the sun every day as long as you can get like 20 to 30 days throughout the year with hopefully at least a couple of days in every month, then you're gonna be able to see clearly the shape of the Anilema in your final photo. There's space of course for all the cloudy days and days where you just couldn't capture the sun. But on the other hand, I realized for me personally, I think I'm gonna have a much higher chance of success with this if I automate the taking of the photos. So my first idea was to use an intervalometer. This is basically just a little trigger with a clock in it that can tell the camera take one picture every day. But the main issue with this was, I'm not sure if an intervalometer like this is gonna be accurate enough to take a photo every 24 hours down to like the second level. Cause if you're off by even like 30 seconds, the position of the sun is wrong and I'm sort of a perfectionist. So, and then another thing is this runs on batteries. I'd rather run everything off AC. So I kept thinking and when I was looking through all of my junk, I found this old Raspberry Pi 3, which is a tiny little single board computer, runs Linux. And for Linux, there's a program called GPhoto 2 where you can automate the taking of your photos with a camera connected to your computer. And then the computer can pull down an accurate time from the internet. So I think this is gonna work, but I do need power to both the Raspberry Pi, power for the DSLR. That's not gonna be a problem because there's an AC outlet there. I do want everything mounted outside here and I wanna leave it there all year protected from the elements. So I need to build some kind of enclosure for this. And at this point, you might think I'm nuts because this is really getting more and more complex and one of my goals was to keep it simple. But I think that in the end, I think all this added level of complexity is gonna be worth it. I'm still finalizing how I want the enclosure to work because I wanna protect all this stuff from the elements but it also needs to open up so I can make adjustments or change out a cable if something goes wrong. So I'm still thinking that all through. If you have some ideas about an enclosure for this, let me know. Probably just gonna use scrap wood, but who knows? Let me just close this video with a rundown of the equipment that I've settled on for this project. In the front of the lens, we have a handmade solar filter. This is made from BOTTER Astro Solar Film and cardboard and tape. And this is what I use to make all of my white light solar filters. It's inexpensive, it works great. With a lens this wide, you actually can shoot without a filter. So why am I using one? Well, if you shoot the sun directly without a filter, you have to stop down. It looks like this from the diffraction pattern. If you shoot it with the solar filter, you just get this perfect white disc of the sun and everything else goes black. Which is actually exactly what we want for an analemma because then we can take all of those photos, composite them together with one unfiltered photo of the scene and then we have our final year long exposure. Now one thing I haven't decided on with the filter is if I'll use this one that I've already made for the lens or once I make the enclosure, if I'm gonna use some kind of bigger front filter here. For the lens, I am using a Rokinon 24 millimeter F1.4. It's a manual lens. I think I'll just be able to set focus once and leave it for the whole project. For the camera, I am using a stock Canon 5D Mark II, which is a pretty old camera that doesn't have video. So I got a very good deal on it used. The camera is not super important, but I think that for the lenses that I wanted to use or the lens I did wanna use this Rokinon 24, I wanted full frame. If you were using a crop sensor, you would need a wider lens to capture the analemma like 12 or 14 millimeters. Okay, in terms of accessories, I have a dummy battery here for the Canon DSLR so it can run off an outlet. I'm gonna have a USB cable going from the camera to this, which is the Raspberry Pi Model 3. You really can do this with any small computer that can run a program to act as a trigger for your camera. And that's it. I'm still not quite underway, but I'm getting very close here. And again, I welcome all comments, critique, suggestions. I think my next video in this series is gonna be an update on the enclosure idea and hopefully first light with this project. Before I go, I wanna tell you a little bit about today's sponsor, Squarespace. 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