WAITING FOR THE SHADOW

SOLAR AND LUNAR ECLIPSE OBSERVING

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TSE2006 Libya
I traveled to Libya for 2 weeks with my friends Bengt Alfredsson and Michael Gill. Lot's of fantastic sights and experiences and then we travelled to the eastern desert (the Great Sand Sea) to observe the eclipse on March 29, 2006.



I purchased a Saxon ED80 f7.5 and shot the eclipse from the Jalu camp. I put stronger wooden legs on my lightweight mounting and made a modified & stronger dec arm.  I shot the eclipse with 35mm film.  I was quite happy with the results.  I felt that finally I had the field of view and image scale about right.  I disposed of the wood legs at Jalu.  I wouldn't have got them back into Australia with our tight quarantine laws.

I also shot some wide angle images with an 18mmf3.5 lens on 35mm film.
http://joe-cali.com/eclipses/LIbya.html


TLE August 2007
I took some great shots of the August 2007 TLE with my Orion 102mm f12.5 Maksutov. Very happy with the results.  Small maks with moving primary mirrors are very hard to focus.  It took me some time to get the focus sharp. No problem during a TLE when totality lasts an hour or two but not during a TSE when you only have a minute or two.  

The view to the left is cropped but the lunar image is approximately 11mm diameter. This image fills much of the vertical dimension of a DX sensor field [15mmx22mm]. During a lunar eclipse, we are principally interested in the lunar disk but during a solar eclipse, this area is of course almost featureless and we are trying to image the corona which extends out some distance from the limb of the Moon - of the order of 4-8 solar radii. The field of a 4 inch Maksutov is too small to capture any outer corona.  These instruments might work well photographing the inner corona, prominences and chromosphere were it not for the difficulty focusing them.

http://joe-cali.com/eclipses/PAST/TLE20070828/TLE2007.html
















TSE2008 Gansu Province NW China
I again modified the lightweight equatorial(LEQ).  The dec became a single arm fork mounting. The RA stayed the same as it had for the past 7 years.  I mounted the ED80mmf7.5 on the LEQ.  I used a digital camera for the first time at a solar eclipse.  A Pentax K10D.  The K10D has 5 stop auto bracketing.  I began building an automated interface for the k10D but since using the auto bracketing, I've stopped working on the computer interface.  I can shoot a full shutter speed sequence from 1/4000s -  4s in less than 40 s.   I also  extended my wide angle photography to include a time lapse sequence showing the shadow crossing the sky. This was also the first eclipse where I attempted video imaging. My video camera was fitted with an ultra wide angle adapter 140 degree horizontal field. Unfortunately I forgot to lock the focus to manual so the AF went hunting in the low light of totality.

Photo : (right) The LEQ with ED80 on top. Photo is a little confusing. The guy in the hat has his camera on a tripod in the background. His tripod appears to be supporting the front end of my ED80. Obviously, it isn't.

Photo : (left) Composite image of totality made from out of focus images.

Though I was generally happy with the photos through the ED 80, there were a few problems with focus.  The ED80 lost focus during the total eclipse.  I eventually traced this down to the big temperature drop which occurred although the lack of fine 10:1 focusing and lack of a firm focus lock did not help.  I decided that if I was to continue using this instrument, I would need to upgrade the focuser. The field was a bit narrow now that I was using a DX sensor DSLR.  So I decided I either had to go to a shorter focal length instrument or add a focal reducer / field flattener to this one.  In the end I decided that adding the two components would make the OTA much heavier and cost almost as much as the refractor I purchased in 2009.
http://joe-cali.com/eclipses/PAST/TSE2008/index.html

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