SOLAR ECLIPSE of AUGUST 11, 1999 Continued
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On the decks of Marco Polo
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As the moon cuts into the image of the sun, shadows through small apertures become crescent shaped:
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At the last moments before second contact (the beginning of totality) the shadow of the moon rushes toward the ship:
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During totality the entire horizon glows with sunset colors:
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The captain of one of these two ships must not have cared if his passengers enjoyed the darkness of the eclipe!
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To photograph the eclipse I used the same Vivitar lens of 800mm focal length with an aperture of f8 (thus the objective is 100 mm or 4 inches diameter), coupled to a Pentax Spotmatic single lens reflex camera as I used at the eclipses of 1970, 1973 and 1998. The film was Kodacolor Gold 800. I did not note the exposures accurately, but they probably ranged from 1/250 to 1/1000 second. The film was processed aboard MV Marco Polo and later scanned with an HP Photosmart scanner. |
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Photographs are no more than a reminder of an eclipse. Here are two more treatments of the scanned negatives of this eclipse, which may give a slightly better impression of some aspects of the experience(click on the images for a larger scale):
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Click for
The First Page on the Eclipse of August 11, 1999
My Other Total Solar Eclipses (1932-1998)
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