Had a bright and beautiful day on December 25, 2000 for both viewing and photographing this eclipse. this is a 1/250 sec exposure on Kodak Supra 400. Click on the image for more and larger views.
On Janruary 20, 2000 my LX-6 was actually used while it was snowing! Lake effect snow is weird because this image was taken while it was snowing. The weather reports for seeing the eclipse did not look promising, but when the time came the cloud deck was just transparent enough to view and photograph. This it a 10 second exposure on Kodak E100VS thru my LX-6 with an f/6.3 focal reducer. This was taken just about at the beginning of totality (11:12 PM EST).
The last vestages of direct sunlight were just visable as this image was captured. This it a 1 second exposure on Kodak E100VS as above. This was taken just before the beginning of totality (11:05 PM EST).
On August 11, 1999 ,at 11:23 AM local time, in Mariazell Austria I took the first picture in a series partial eclipse photos. This photo was taken with a Meade ETX EC with a Thousand Oaks type 2+ Solar filter and a Meade 0.63 focal reducer for an effective f.l. of 790mm. This was a 1/125 second exposure on Kodak Extapress PJ400 using a Minolta SRT-102. The day started out cloudy, but by first contact the sky was looking promising. That soon changed...
What? No corona you say! Well, 20 minutes before totality the clouds moved in. They moved out 10 minutes after totality! This was STILL an awsome site! 5000 miles and hundreds of dollars worth of telescopes and equipement was still worth this experience. Yes there was a small amount of disappointment, But I'm still happy I went (plus I get to keep the equipement!). This image was a 4 second exposure on Ektachrome E100VS using my Minolta X700 with a Sigma 24mm f2.8 lens. Scanned using a HP S20 film scanner.
My dear friend Pavel Kodytek created this animation form a series of photos he took during the eclipse. This is awsome work! I really thank Pavel for inviting me and my wife to Prague and the bus trip to Austria to witness the eclipse.
A few minutes after the eclipse there was enough of a break in the clowds to snap this frame, a program mode exposure on Ektachrome E100VS using my Minolta X700 with Tokina 80-200mm f2.8 zoom lens at 200mm. This gives you a good feel for the weather we had in Mariazell.
After a while the clouds began to clear and the ETX was rendered usefull again. I catured this image of the partial eclipse. This image used the same settings and equipement as the First Contact image above, but there was still a vale of clouds that caused the image to be darker.
