Solar Filter from No. 14 Welding Lens

thingiverse

Wanted to make a lens to image the upcoming solar eclipse. To do so either with a camera or viewing directly you need a No. 14 welding lens. I decided that I would make one to mount on my Nikon 500mm f4P lens. The design comes in 3 parts plus a printed mounting screw and slides over the end of the lens. The No. 14 welding glass slides in the top of the holder. The 3 parts were printed out of PLA and then glued together with super glue. I have included the Scad files if others would like to modify the design to fit their specific camera lens. How does it work? Well the images show. It does work as you can see from the green image of the sun. Unfortunately the welding glass is optically not very good and thus the resulting image is not very detailed and crisp. I bought an actual solar filter from Seymor Solar as a result and the images produced by it on the same camera are far crisper. See the orange images. You can even see the sun spots. This setup is obviously far cheaper than a solar filter and will do the job to capture the phases of the solar eclipse, but I prefer the solar filter results. Wanted to post this though as others might like the effect of the welding glass or use the same adapter to mount a solar lens that has better optical properties than welding glass.