Using gphoto2 for eclipse photography with Canon liveview and mirror lock

Hooked on Astronomy <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.multimedia.gphoto.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I'm planning to travel to see the total eclipse of the Sun in August and have
used gphoto2 to create a Python script that automates taking photographs. 
I'm using a Canon 5D Mark II camera and --trigger-capture to take the
images.  The script takes a long series of images, modifying the ISO setting
and exposure times as the eclipse proceeds (the camera will be mounted on
telescope so the aperture is fixed).

Everything works well and I can take a photo per second during the total
eclipse itself.  However, the mirror is raised and dropped with each shot. 
I'm concerned that this will introduce vibration and blur images as some of
the shots I have to take are at quite long exposures - up to 0.25 of a
second.  Is there a way to do this with the mirror locked up?  I've read
various old posts of people trying to do that but none of the techniques I
have tried to copy work.  I enable mirror lock in the camera menus and start
live view also by the camera.  If I try to take an image using either
--trigger-capture, --set-config eosremoterelease=5 or  --capture-image I get
an error in the I/O library saying 'unknown error' and error -110 I/O in
progress.  

The Canon API itself does allow this functionality as the software Canon
supply lets you put the camera in liveview, see a preview and take as many
images as you like without the mirror dropping.  It doesn't let you take an
automated sequence though.  There is also a commercial software package you
can buy that does it. 

I'm using gphoto2 and libgphoto2 2.5.9 installed using apt-get.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Gavin 



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