Click on thumbnail
for full-sized image |
or
here
for small |
The eclipse itself |
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"First Contact" -
the leading edge of the Moon is just touching the edge of the Sun. |
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The first nibble
appears… |
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… and the bite gets
progressively bigger … |
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For these shots I used 1/125
second and 1000 mm at f/10 on Fuji ASA100 print film. You need a serious
(specialist) objective filter to prevent burning out your camera, let alone destroying
your eye. |
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Several nice sunspot groups
can be seen … |
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Each sunspot is big enough to
swallow the Earth without a burp … |
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Sunspots are fiercely bright,
but look dark because they are "cooler" (i.e. less hot) than their surroundings,
and thus emit less light… |
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The "limb darkening
effect" can also be seen … |
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Photons mostly radiate out of
the Sun perpendicular to its surface, so the edge as we see it appears darker than the
centre of the Sun. |
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The munching continues... |
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Gradually the Moon
covers the sun... |
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Finally all that remains is a
faint sliver of the Sun's disc, looking like a delicate cut with a surgeon's knife in the
fabric of space. |
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Suddenly the sun is all gone,
except for the tiniest jewel-like sparkle peeking out through a valley between
mountains or craters on the Moon's edge. Even that is intensely bright, requiring an
exposure of 1/2000 sec at f/10 on ASA100 film. This is known as the "diamond
ring". To the eye, it is truly breathtaking. |
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Prominences - eruptions of
hot solar matter bursting out of the Sun's edge - can be seen, shining a delicate red-pink
in the Hydrogen-Alpha wavelengths. The matter arches in loops and filaments, influenced by
strong magnetic fields. A hint of the chromosphere is redly visible. |
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The corona blazes forth in
the darkness, falling rapidly in intensity as it gets farther from the Sun's disk. To the
eye, incredibly beautiful tendrils of ethereal luminosity stream out, to as much as
10 degrees from the disc, with detail beyond the ability of film to capture. Here, I
exposed for the inner corona. |
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A longer exposure (of 2
seconds, in this case) yields detail on film leading farther out. A still longer exposure
would show detail even farther out. The inner area is then unavoidably overexposed. Two
seconds is about the limit for a 1000 mm focal length lens, to avoid the rotation of the
Earth from blurring the image. A good solid mounting is mandatory. |
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All too suddenly, it is over
- the Sun finds another valley on the other side of the Moon, creating a second diamond
ring. This one is a mere 3 minutes and 13 seconds from the first. |
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Now you must act quickly. The
slightest hesitation can cause irreparable damage to your eye and even your equipment.
That filter must be replaced immediately, a task made difficult by the excitement of the
awesome event. |
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Finally, the second partial
phase plays out in a mirror image of the first … |
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Gradually the sunspots that
were covered up reappear … |
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We are left with the same
technical and aesthetic appreciation of the partial phases as before… |
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However, having experienced
totality truly spoils one for anything less. |
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Regretfully, we start packing
up in order to catch the plane, saying good-bye… |
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… with perhaps half an
hour to go to "final contact". |
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Click on thumbnail
for full-sized image |
or here
for small |
The ambiance |
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We flew directly from
Johannesburg to Lusaka, and observed from a grass field just outside the airport terminal
building…alongside about a thousand other people from all around the world. |
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You might be about to stand
in the shadow of the Moon, but it's still time for suntan lotion, hats and mosquito
repellent. At this altitude and latitude, the sun is harsh and there remains a real threat
of Malaria (even in winter). |
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This is the kind of equipment
you need to get pictures like the ones I managed. I used a Meade 4-inch (100 mm) aperture
Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope on a manually driven equatorial mounting (less to go wrong),
coupled to a Minolta 7000 35 mm SLR camera with a right-angle viewfinder and an electronic
shutter release. The all-important filter is secured with two clamping screws. |
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During totality, it gets dark
as night. The corona is so beautiful that even those with fancier equipment than mine (and
thus obviously on a photographic mission) took time out merely to gawk, losing all track
of time. I needed the flash for this picture. |
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The horison, all 360 degrees
of it, looks like sunset. In the sky, bright stars and planets appear. The corona is
visible for 10 degrees, bright at the edge of the moon and dropping off into a ghostly
vapor further away. To pick up the twilight, Jupiter and the outer corona, this was a
longish exposure, which is the reason for the pretty lens flare below the sun. |
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Just before and just after
totality, the sun is reduced to a narrow sliver that approximates a slit source of light.
Shadows become sharp and the sky takes on a steely blue otherworldly light. White surfaces
sometimes show "shadow bands" racing along - these are diffraction bands caused
by the sunlight interfering at the edge of the moon. For this, you need an airless body
like the Moon - an atmosphere would just smudge things, which is why the shadow of the
earth during why Lunar eclipses looks so different. |
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This is our plane, a Fokker
F28 medium haul twin-engined jet, seating 75. Although there were ground crew to help,
those few of us who had bulky equipment loaded the hold ourselves. It was virtually empty.
We had almost unlimited baggage allowance, as most people only took a small bag of
belongings, if anything. |
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On the plane home, we caught
a glimpse of the sun setting over Lake Kariba. This was the second solar eclipse of the
day, the "big one" we experience every 24 hours, as the Earth passes between the
observer and the Sun. |
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Click on image to go to site |
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Associated information |
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ASSA
Jo'burg
Centre. |
The home page of the Johannesburg Centre
of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa |
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Evan
Dembskey |
The
"unofficial" ASSA Johannesburg Centre web site, maintained by Evan Dembskey. You
can see a bit more of my stuff there. |
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Jo'burg
Planetarium |
The Johannesburg Planetarium and
the Johannesburg Centre of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa have a close
association. |
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Fred
Espenak |
The reference site for
eclipse chasers.
Maintained by Fred Espenak of NASA. |
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SDAC |
NASA's Solar Data
Acquisition Center |
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Meade
Instruments
Corp. |
The people who created
the optics used to obtain this site's images. |
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Minolta |
The people who created my camera, and who
incidentally also build rather nice planetarium projectors. |
