Sunday, May 20, 2012

The Solar Eclispe of May 20, 2012

We will have to wait another 16 years for another one of these events to happen. I don't think I've ever witnessed an annular eclipse. The last solar eclipse I saw was in California when I worked at Cal State Northridge University. We used two pieces of paper and poked a pinhole in one and let the light pass through it to the other paper to safely watch the eclipse. When we were kids, we got a piece of glass and smoked it with candle soot and viewed the eclipse with that. I think the one I saw in California about 20 years ago was a partial eclipse as it did not block out the sun like tonight's event did.

Talk about drama!

I uploaded a few of the images to my Flickr Photostream:



What came as a surprise was the circular shadows when it was in the full on annular phase.

Wow!!!

I hung out with my friend, Pat Berrett who came up with an inexpensive trick to safely view and photograph the eclipse with-a #88 neutral density filter It worked just fine, thank you! Neither of us had a big zoom lens upon ourselves (I didn't bring mine with me-just my stand-by 18-70 mm lens). But, we were thrilled with what we got seeing as we made do with what we had! We just held the piece of filter over our lens as we took pictures. Plain and simple, that's for sure!


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