I took out my telescope this weekend to see the partial solar eclipse. The conditions weren't great - hazy clouds all over - but it was still really cool to watch. Here are to pictures I took, and a video I made from them.
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| A nice shot of the Sun before the eclipse began, showing a few of the sunspots visible on Sunday. One of these days, I think I will invest in a Hydrogen-Alpha filter so I can get those cool pictures of solar prominences and surface granules. |
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| I bought some eclipse viewing glasses for the kids. This is what the eclipse looked like through those - shot with my little point-and-shoot camera. |
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| Maybe 10 minutes or so into the eclipse. This is a little over exposed, and you can see the glow around it from the hazy clouds I was shooting through, but you can still see the sunspots pretty well. |
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| Further into the eclipse - clearer but more over-exposed. The sunspots are nearly washed out here. This was the first time I had ever photographed the Sun through my scope, and I learned a lot about proper exposure settings this weekend. |
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| This is pretty much the maximum - from Idaho, we only got a partial eclipse, as opposed to viewers further south who were treated to a "ring of fire" from an annular eclipse. Over-exposed again. *sigh* |
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| Nearly finished. Finally, a really good exposure. The color and brightness are both good, and you can see the sunspots again. This was about the last view of the eclipse we got before it moved behind a thicker cloud bank. Still, we got to see a lot! |
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| I put together a series of images from different times in the eclipse. Because of the way the moon is moving, it makes the sun look like it's rolling along, but these are not rotated from each other. They are all taken from the same orientation. |
I took a bunch of the images I shot, and combined them into a video showing the progress of the eclipse. It jumps or pauses in a few parts because I wasn't real careful about picking images that were taken at exact time intervals, so it's not as smooth as it could be. Even so, I think it looks kinda neat.
