Partial Solar Eclipse of June 10, 2002

Introduction

The following images of the eclipse show why it's not really a good idea to become aware of the eclipse the day before the event and then expect equipment and operating skills to be able to perform at peak. These images suffer from focusing problems due to multiple internal reflections, and varying exposures from a confused digital camera. The green cast of the images is due to the filter.

Equipment: 10cm f/4 telescope stopped down to 3 cm f/13, 25mm eyepiece. HP618 digital camera. All images taken via eyepiece projection.

Images

Full disc test shot taken day before eclipse. Not quite in focus. Sunspot group barely visible.
17:12 First shot. Overexposed with clouds.
17:16 Finally got exposure reasonably correct. Clouds visible against disc. Only slight fuzzy from reflections.
17:41 Interesting overexposure. Bad pixel visible in solar glare, or is it really Vulcan?
18:00 At peak. Reflections visible.
18:17 Visible multiple reflections. Sunspots visible.
18:29 Last shot taken. Multiple reflections mimicing a focus problem. Bad pixel visible on solar disc.

Notes

• The camera's clock was still on PST. Add one hour to the times show on each image.

• The eclipse was predicted to begin at 17:01 PDT with the sun at 38 degrees altitude, peak at 18:01 at 29 degrees, and end at 18:57 at 20 degrees.

• The first few minutes were spent trying to convince the camera to give a nice exposure. The camera has no fully manual mode, so exposure priority was used. The camera's aperture setting may have been confused throughout by the metering system not being able to deal with the extreme contrast and smallish size of the subject -- occasional frames were entirely dark.

• Variable clouds were present until about 17:30. They may have contributed to the exposure problem.

• The images have no consistent north-south orientation. Although, in general, the path of the moon is correctly portrayed.

• The original JPEG images were re-saved at a lower quality setting without visible damage at normal size for display here.