Eclipse weather...

[ffutures]

...not looking good. With 15 minutes to go it's completely overcast, really doesn't look like any improvement is likely. Also cold, damp, and miserable. But I've got my cameras ready and will keep an eye open for any break in the clouds. Still more than an hour to the maximum and I might get lucky.

Comments

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Cold, damp, and now almost dark here!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Past the maximum in London, didn't see a damn thing apart from it getting darker. Watching it on TV instead. Just watching the aircraft feed of the moment of totality'

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Same at this end of the borough.

[turol.livejournal.com]

25 minutes to maximum in Finland, nice clear sky.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

How did it go?

[turol.livejournal.com]

Was still nice and clear at maximum (about 90%). Definitely looked darker than usual. Also the sky was an interesting color. Dark blue, not light or reddish like a sunset. Used a ghetto pinhole projector. It almost worked. Also borrowed another guys smoke glass to see it. No pictures though.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Shame - someone on a science list I post to got some very good pictures of about 90% totality using the "foil blanket over lens" technique but I can't link to it.

[pauldormer.livejournal.com]

So overcast here in Guildford, I couldn't even work out where the sun was supposed to be.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Same here - I had to use an ipad app!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Sky cleared here in Scotland and I actually got a pretty good look, no totality though, so it wasn't super impressive. Didn't get dark at all.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's very subjective - your eye can adjust to a huge lighting range, e.g. the light levels in an average office are probably about the same as the surface of Pluto.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

There was only light cloud to start with here in Edinburgh but it got more overcast during the eclipse. I was able to shoot pictures through the gaps.



This was shot with a cheap stupidzoom Sony camera, 35x and 20 megapixels, through a welder's helmet glass mounted in a homebrew frame on a tripod. Close to maximum eclipse the filter was a bit too strong and the pictures picked up reflections from the inside surface as the shutter time increased hence the double-vision effect.

By the time it got towards the end of the eclipse the cloud was really thick so the image quality was quite low.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Those are pretty good considering the camera. Would you mind if I linked to them on a science technician's site? Might be useful for lessons.

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Yep, go ahead. The camera was a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-H300, a low-end bridge camera with a very long zoom range and high pixel count hence the decent size of the images (the ones above are actually scaled down by about a factor of 4 or so). The autofocus hunted a lot, there was no manual focus and I couldn't override the exposure and aperture settings so they're not as good as I would have liked.

The original images are all green since that's the colour of the welding helmet filter, I converted them to greyscale in PhotoPaint.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Many thanks!

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

OK - I've done that, and said that if they want to use them in lessons they should download a copy to their network and link to that, rather than chewing up your bandwidth.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

Wasn't looking good at dawn, here in Cheltenham, but I suddenly realised at about 8.30 that the sun was out, spent 10 minutes dashing about getting my camera stuff together, then went down to join the Cotswold Astronomical Society at Imperial Gardens. It stayed clearish until around maximum, then a sheet of thinnish cloud rolled over, covering the sun until the eclipse was over.

Just sorting my pics out now. Not many good ones, since the autofocus couldn't cope with the bright sun even through an IR filter, and the manual focus sucks (or I suck at manually focussing).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Light reduction is what it's all about with this stuff - your eye can handle a much bigger range than most cameras.