| Eclipses |
| I made this video 2001 June 21, near Chirundu, Zimbabwe. According to my GPS the coordinates are 16° 02.95d South, 28° 51.33d East ; elevation, 1502 feet. The site was deliberately chosen to be very near the southern edge of the total eclipse path, the idea being to maximize the viewing of edge phenomena at the expense of totality time. And at that, our group Eclipse Edge Expeditions, was very successful.
I selected the steadiest of the 30 frames in each second of recording (Sony Digital 8 Handycam, DCR-TRV320). This was necessary as the image bounced every few seconds. The camcorder was piggy-backed on my Meade 2045 LX3 (1000m fl, f10) telescope through which I was simultaneously taking 35mm photos (these, taken on Ektachrome 100 can be seen in my public photo album). Every time I advanced the film or adjusted the exposure on my manual Minolta SRT 101 camera the video would vibrate for a second or so. I was using a X2 teleconverter on the camcorder, so this aggravated the problem. Image processing of the individual frames was done using Picture Window Pro 3; I adjusted the gamma to 1.4, registered the frames, and added the times. The MPEG movie was made with Studio DV. The times are fairly accurate. I set the camcorder clock with my GPS the morning of the eclipse. The number to the right of the slash represents the frame count from the start of each second; they run from 00 to 29. Note that the frames are only occasionally one second or 30 frames apart. As the mount was polar aligned, south is up and east is right in each image. This orientation will appear different from the many alt-azimuth videos made of the eclipse. Our expedition leader, Tom Van Flandern, predicted 71 seconds of totality for our site. In the movie the first diamond ring doesn’t completely fade until 13:11:18 UT, 15 seconds after predicted 2nd contact. The second diamond ring begins to form at about 13:12:15 UT, only one second after predicted 3rd contact. |
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