Is it possible to take a picture of the sun?
After taking a few pictures of the moon I was wondering "How about the sun?"
Of course, one should never look into the sun. We can go blind from that!
So can a camera sensor "burn out", get damaged by it? Yes, it can. But under what circumstances?
I did some google research, watched a few youtube videos by photographers and it all came down to a solid "maybe".
While (prolonged) exposure to the sun can really damage the sensor of your camera, a (very) short period of time can be endured. The main reason was:
There are a lot of folks out there who do not turn off their camera between each shot. Walking around with it, it hangs around their neck, swinging into different directions. And the sensor is active to create the preview image for the screen on the back side. Surely the camera swings into the sun a few times. The number of complaints that the sun burned out the sensor (and there are some on the internet) is not high enough to account for the number of people that behave that way.
Ok, so I dared taking a picture of the sun with a Lumix FZ-82.
Going for a low sunset, I set the ISO to lowest value possible (80) and closed the aperture to the max (in my case f/8).
For shutter speed I went with 1/2000 and that turned out to be very dark, almost black with a yellowish spot. Not very exciting.
But then I turned it up to 1/1600 and this picture was taken.
I then quickly turned away again in fear it might after all damage the sensor.
All this happened on January 8th. I have taken several (over one hundred) other pictures since then and the sensor is fine.
I like how the foreground is almost completely black, giving just a silhouette, while the cloud formation and sky got much more details and a few colors.
The raw file is put away for the time until I can get more familiar with the development process and maybe edge some more features out of this in the future.