[Leica] Eclipse photos

[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