We watched the partial solar eclipse quite closely this morning, with eight different instruments.
Going counterclockwise, we have:
- A pair of solar viewing glasses from the 1999 total eclipse.
- The SeeStar telescope with a solar filter.
- The new solar binoculars.
- The digital SLR with zoom lens, and, of course, solar filter.
- The cardboard solar projector telescope, bought for the 1999 eclipse
- The 5" Meade telescope with, you guessed it, a solar filter.
We used all the instruments, but the 5" gave the best view, and the SeeStar got the best pictures, overall.
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Just starting: see the big sunspot near the limb. There are some smaller, fainter spots towards the top-middle of the disc. |
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Near maximum, and the smaller sunspots are close to the edge of the moon. |
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Nearly over |
I snapped the sky with my phone to show that it was getting somewhat cloudy.
The sun is completely overexposed, of course. But wait. What's that spot on the dome? (In case you are wondering, we couldn't use the 8" telescope in the dome for this event, as we don't have a solar filter for it.)
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Look at that reflection! |
So that's the seventh way we could see the eclipse (although we didn't notice it at the time, only when looking at this photo).
What about the eighth? Well, that's the same as the way we "observed" a partial eclipse 10 years ago, with our solar PV:
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The big dip: that's no cloud, that's the (partial) eclipse) |
The device to attach a phone camera to the 5" telescope arrived in the post later in the afternoon. Oh well. In any case, a well observed eclipse.
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