Total eclipse of the Sun - 2002/12/04

I travelled - along with my family and bus-load of other people - to Ceduna (in South Australia) for the total eclipse of the Sun, December 4, 2002. The weather prospects were not great, but I was greedy for the few extra seconds that the coastal location offered for this eclipse.

I'm pleased to say that the weather cleared enough to view the majority of the event, failing only to see the Sun setting still partially eclipsed. Here are some of my pictures of the event. Most were taken through my 4-inch (102mm) f/10 Meade SCT on Kodak Gold 100 print film. These images are from scans of the prints (I shall try to get the negatives scanned soon so that I can extract a bit more information from them).

Click on the thumnail to view a larger image. I've kept these images reasonably small - ask me if you'd like a higher resolution image for your own use.

42Kb	A view of the eclipse viewing site. My equipment is in the forground; one tripod has the video camera, while the other contains my telescope. We travelled some 4300Km from Sydney and back again on the bus in the background.
65Kb	A composite of most of the images. It's rather unexciting to view the partial phase pictures so they're all here, along with a couple of totality. The partial phases were through a Baader AstroSolar filter, about 1/250s exposure.
30Kb	Second contact - the "diamond ring" effect. Filter removed and also about 1/250s.
20Kb	A few seconds later. Same exposure time, but processed to better display the few tiny prominences that were visible around the limb.
40Kb	Longer exposure to show more of the corona - about 1/4s exposure, but I don't know exactly as I was just twiddling the exposure knob and clicking away on the shutter while watching the eclipse.
32Kb	Third contact - another attempt at the diamond ring, but I still had the exposure dial set for the corona and so very overexposed. Boy those clouds were close!
42Kb	Pam took this slightly close-up view with her camera at 3×zoom.
41Kb	The scene in wide angle a few seconds later, also by Pam.
34Kb	Just before the clouds finally obscured the Sun, my son Alexander grabbed this shot with his camera.

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