[Leica] Eclipse photos

[hlritter at twc.com (Howard L Ritter Jr)]

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Eclipse/ 
<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Eclipse/>


As a lifelong amateur astronomer and photographer, I sympathized with Larry 
Z?s recent advice to forget about photographing the eclipse and just watch 
it.

As a lifelong amateur astronomer and photographer, I felt free to ignore the 
advice!

My son and I drove from Raleigh and Charlotte to the town of Murphy, where 
the path of totality would cross the extreme SW corner of North Carolina. 
Weather turned out better than predicted: Hardly a cloud to be seen, and not 
one on the face of the Sun until 5 seconds after the Moon fully departed it.

To supplement the visual enjoyment, I brought my 100-mm binocular telescope 
with eyepieces for 21x and metal-on-glass filters to go over the objective 
lenses. These came off at totality for what turned out to be a spectacular 
view of the Sun?s corona and numerous prominences rising up past the 
silhouette of the Moon. I also brought my Nikon D810A with an 80-400 Nikkor 
zoom equipped with a similar filter. I did experience some frustration 
trying to get good focus with the camera, and I wonder whether the quality 
of the glass filter was not good enough to match the native performance of 
the lens. There is a neutral-density glass filter with nearly the same 
optical density as this reflective filter, and I?m tempted to try it just to 
see if I can get better detail on the Sun.

In any case, the experience of watching a total eclipse of the Sun was every 
bit as spectacular and ethereal as I?d hoped it would be. I?d seen numerous 
partial eclipses, and I can tell you that no partial eclipse of less than 
99% or so prepares you for that happens as that last 1% disappears, and 
nothing at all about a partial eclipse even resembles the sight of totality. 
During the partial phase there?s a dark bite out of the Sun in a bright sky, 
but as the last sliver of Sun disappears, the level of illumination drops 
precipitously and dramatically, and the winking out of the last remnant is 
like?no, it?s NOT like anything else. The whole world goes dim, fast and 
shockingly. And whereas the partially eclipsed Sun of practically any degree 
still looks like a brilliant spot too bright to look at in a blue sky, the 
eclipsed Sun is totally different. There?s now a glowing nimbus surrounding 
a terrifying black hole where the Sun used to be, none of which was visible 
until totality. It?s other-worldly and sinister. We?re used to seeing 
nothing change in real time in the heavens, just slow day-to-day changes and 
a constant, reliable Sun. In the last seconds before totality we see the 
actual movement of heavenly bodies and then the obscuration of the Sun, and 
it?s too massive and overpowering and beyond human scale to understand or 
tolerate with a placid mind. No wonder the ancients were terrified of these 
things!

I got a few good shots, and one bystander who asked if he could take a 
picture through the binoculars with his iPhone got a one-in-a-million shot ? 
as well as proving that decent images of the event could be gotten this way. 

?howard