Thursday, 23 October 2014

Partial Solar Eclipse of Oct 23, 2014 (iPad photo)

Here is a picture of the partial solar eclipse, taken with my iPad, through a pair of cheap solar eclipse glasses, that were being handed out at the University of Alberta observatory.  These are actually reflections in a nearby window - the CCDs became saturated too fast to get a shot of the cresent sun if you pointed the iPad lens at it directly, and turned into your standard solar blob picture.  But through the reduced light of the reflection, you could get the crescent shape, though the picture thereby got a double image (due to reflections from both sides of the window panes, slightly offset because of the thickness of the glass).  The first picture is just an enlargement of the second, using GIMP software.






This was sometime after the maximum coverage, which got to about 75% in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  Walking around, the light did strike one as unusual.  I thought to myself that this would be like the light levels on Mars on a sunny autumn day, about one quarter of the light levels that we get on Earth.

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