More eclipse...

[alexpgp]

Soon after I went out to board the van to the hotel at 4:30 pm, a bunch of people from the French team emerged from the door of the полтинник with the expectation of seeing something of the eclipse, so I jumped out, showed them how to use my "camera," and left it with them, figuring I'd be able to improvise something when I got back to the hotel.

Upon returning to the hotel, I sought the interior of the grape arbor where I had successfully taken pictures of the transit of Venus a few campaigns ago, in June 2004. Unfortunately, the position of the sun in the sky precluded the use of any of the small nail holes in the tin roof as a "lens" through which to project the image of the sun.

On the other hand, I found - to my utter, childlike delight - that the sun, shining through numerous small gaps in the grape leaves on the vines that enclose the arbor, was throwing as many images of the eclipse onto the floor and the bench inside the arbor.


I propped a piece of white paper on the bench, with the surface oriented more or less perpendicular to the sun's rays, and managed to get a shot of multiple, fairly round images of the partially eclipsed sun at about 4:33 pm, which was about 15 minutes before maximum coverage here in Baikonur.


For comparison, here's a similar shot taken 11 minutes later, at or about maximum.


This image is darker because of deliberate underexposure, not because the ambient light had faded. In fact, I showed this last picture to a member of the prop team about two minutes after I shot it and he asked "When was the eclipse?"

This jives with my recollection of the eclipse of July 1991. If you didn't know there was an eclipse going on, and that the moon was obscuring 70% or so of the sun's disk, you probably wouldn't realize there was anything amiss. I personally thought the normally bright, squinty light of mid-afternoon seemed a bit mellower; we are talking about two celestial f-stops, after all.

Got to go put my laundry in the dryer.

Cheers...

UPDATE: Apparently, the first image above was deemed worthy of inclusion in a round-up post at the Wired Science Blog.

Comments

[egofood.livejournal.com]

Via SpaceWeather (http://www.spaceweather.com) I read a NASA page (http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/29jul_solareclipse.htm) on the eclipse the other day that mentioned that same "see it through the trees technique", but the photos there pale in comparison to the crescent horde you shot.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the kind words.

Cheers...