Solar eclipse musings
in Science on Astronomy, Eclipse, Solar
In honour of last weeks solar eclipse sweeping across parts of Europe I dug up some old pictures which I never digitized. These are pictures of the previous full solar eclipse crossing the whole of Europe. To capture the eclipse I chased the sun all the way to the south Hungary with a group of friends. The weeks leading up to the eclipse were clear, hot and sticky in land locked Hungary. It was to our surprise that we found the day of the eclipse to be overcast.
As we did not have any ways of getting any reliable weather information (especially not as localized as needed to find some blue sky), we jumped into the care and started chasing any blue patch in the sky. The wild ride ended on an intersection in front of a pub when the sky finally cleared and we could setup for some eclipse gazing.
I was a student on a budget at the time so I set up my tripod, trusty mechanical Pentax K1000 and a cheap no name brand 800mm f/6 lens. The image below is a stack of 4 exposures of the eclipse shot on that late morning on the 11th of August of 1999. I was happily surprised to recover some nice detail in the corona. The original prints didn’t do the pictures justice. Enjoy…
