9 thoughts on “Eclipse 2025”

  1. It was too bright to see the eclipse properly down here, so many thanks for that. I thought I noticed the light getting a bit dimmer around 11am, but that may have been imagination. Is that a sunspot towards the left-hand edge?

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    1. Yes. Surprisingly it seemed to be the only sunspot. That made it hard to focus. But that was way down on my list of things that went wrong today. Will say a bit more later, but you may have noticed that the video starts halfway through.

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  2. Coup[le of pics from this morning.

    This one was from the six inch scope. Unfortunately the focus isn’t as good as I would like. It’s quite difficult to judge the focus on a small camera screen in bright sunlight. Of course, it’s equally difficult to get it right in the darkness at night as well. The lack of sunspots made it particularly hard today.

    This one was taken with a Panasonic Lumix camera and a Carl Zeiss 135mm lens. I’ve got dozens of pics from these two sources. It’ll taken me a while to sort through them all and pick a few good ones.

    All of these images are of the sun’s photosphere, taken in “white” light. The different colours are just the effects of the filters used to reduce the brightness of the sun. You may have seen spectacular pictures of flares and prominences like this one.

    https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231119.html

    These are images of the sun’s chromosphere. If I can get around to it, I might put together a post explaining the difference between the two – and why it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever post any images of the latter.

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  3. I had major problems getting pictures this morning. I thought I had everything prepared. The smart scope and the six inch scope were both in use last night with no problems. I had my sun filters ready and spent the early morning charging up all the batteries. Everything was set up and ready to go.

    A few minutes before the start of the eclipse, I switched on the wifi in the six inch scope. Nothing. Completely dead. It’s NEVER done that before. I took out the batteries and made sure I’d put them in the right way round. Checked all the connections. Nothing obviously wrong.

    OK, I thought, I’ll just go indoors and get some more batteries. First I’ll switch on the smart scope and set it up to take some picture. It powered up fine, showing the battery on the scope and the phone i use as a controller as fully charged. Great. Then a message came up. “New firmware ready to install. Install it now.”

    This was not a question, it was a command. There was no option to cancel the new firmware and install it later. If I didn’t install it now then there’d be no eclipse on the smart scope. The scope was outdoors and the wifi signal was weak. The installation proceeded at a snails pace before giving up and starting again. Half an hour into the eclipse, I finally got it working, but of course I’d missed the start on both scopes.

    The moral. Don’t assume that it’ll work today if it worked last night. Get it all working an hour in advance next time.

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  4. Nice video – sorry to hear of the tech difficulties which must’ve been panic-inducing. I tried taking pictures on my phone with its 30x zoom – of course it couldn’t cope with the sun’s brightness but lens flare produced a nice ‘image’ of the partial eclipse.

    Devious Dave

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  5. I used a pinhole to see how far it had got. My nephew had recently installed solar panels and his daily readout shows a definite dip between 10 and 12.

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  6. Long before “Artificial Intelligence” there was “Machine Cussedness” — the timing of the upgrade demand wasn’t accidental – it’s the same mechanism that causes printers to jam when you’re in a hurry 🙂

    I learnt a new word the other week (literally – it’s a neologism) — “resistentialism” the perception that inanimate objects ‘conspire’ to frustrate and thwart you.

    Shame you had all that stress – but what a set of pictures !! Well done, and thanks for sharing them.

    I didn’t feel as if it got any darker, but the eye and brain [even my ageing one] are masers of compensation, so when I read Paul’s comment I thought I’d check the power graph for my solar panels and – yes – there was a noticeable dip.

    Thanks again Peter for the pictures (and descriptions) of the real “heavens” which juxtapose well with the ramblings about the imaginary versions.

    Birch

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    1. ‘Resistentialism’: that gave me a blast from the past! There was a humourous writer called Paul Jennings (1918-89) who specialised on short articles in Punch etc riffing on odd byways of life. One of them (a bit longer than most) is called ‘Report on Resistentialism’, (motto: ‘things are against us’), which is largely a p*ss-take of early-60s philosophy. I have just fished his anthology ‘The Jenguin Pennings’ off the shelf to remind myself, and the article is as funny as ever. Happy memories!

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