2017-08-21
This was the bestest solar eclipse ever! Well, best of those that I've seen, and I still haven't seen a total eclipse. The weather was perfect. I woke up to a clear blue sky with no clouds and knew that everything was go for this eclipse. Temperature was 22° and there was no wind.
These photos were shot with a Panasonic FZ-30 at maximum zoom (420 mm). The sun is bright, very bright, but I don't have a solar filter so I had to hack one. ISO 200, and the camera was set to manual mode with exposures of 1/100 @ f/3.7 and 1/200 @ f/3.7 used for these photos.
Filtering was done with a flat mirror from an old car that was aluminized but not painted over. This is not safe for visual observations but is fine with a digital camera that has no optical path to the eye. It was still too bright, so a further reduction was accomplished with a 720 nm IR-pass filter acting in combination with the camera's own internal IR-blocking filter. Yup, this awful combination actually worked but I really should buy a proper solar filter. The IR filter caused the camera to produce false colours due to its internal tri-colour filters not being specified for IR.
If one looks closely, one can see sunspots only in some of the photos. I don't know if there was a fine-focus problem or if a denoise algorithm in the camera removed or damaged them.
Event timeline
All dates and times are UTC and were referenced to network time via NTP.
- 16:10 First contact.
- 16:57 It's noticeably dimmer outside.
- 17:13 Motion-detecting lights believe it's twilight and start to activate on motion. It's nowhere near as dark as when they normally activate in the evening, so this may be due to a massive reduction in infrared light, which human vision can't see.
- 17:15 A temperature drop outside is noticed. Possibly due to the reduction of scattered infrared light; as most of the sun's emissions are infrared, that's where a percentage reduction of all emissions might be noticed first.
- 17:21 Maximum eclipsed.
- 17:38 Motion-detecting lights no longer believe that it's twilight, so they shut down.
- 17:49 It's noticeably brighter outside.
- 18:37 Final contact. The sun is back to normal: No light is blocked so it feels hot against the skin when one faces it.
The sun produces more infrared energy than visual light. The moon blocking most of this may be why solar eclipses, even partial eclipses, seem to be so weird with respect to strange lighting, temperature changes, and animal reactions.