Eclipses never cease to fascinate. Whether it's their rarity, the extensive lore, or the wonderful sense they can give of being part of the celestial clockwork, few astronomical events can compare in either hype or reality. I'm as infected as anyone but those diehard eclipse-chasers, so here are some samples. For much more information on past and future eclipses, you can't do better than Fred Espenak's eclipse page at Goddard.

First up, the June 10, 2002, eclipse, seen as annular over the Pacific Ocean and a tiny bit of Baja California. My location for the partial phases can be derived from the following image sequence.

This series was taken at 10-minute intervals starting at 1730 MST. The equipment was pretty primitive - a 35mm Canon camera, Spiratone zoom lens at 230mm, doubler, and Thousand Oaks solar filter about 25mm in diamater in front of the lens. (Duct tape, the end of a can for cake icing, and fingers formed a three-fold system to make sure the filter didn't go anywhere). Exposures were 1/100 second on Kodacolor 100 film (a guess based on comparing the filtered Sun's brightness to sunlit landscape). Truth in advertising compels me to note that the "sunset" image isn't over the geometric horizon, but over a carefully chosen bit of the Tucson Mountains. The only manipulation of the scanned images, after cut-and-pasting, was a mild stretch to match the contrast of two images that didn't quite match the others in exposure. That last shot is the one I went after, and is worth the cholla spines I had to pull out of my backside.

Moving back in time, my sole experience to date with a total solar eclipse was for the February 26, 1979, event, caught in Oregon. Several groups of students from UCSC drove up. Among these, we managed to find a clear patch of sky with about 20 minutes to go before totality (that's the fastest my old Mercury ever went). An 8mm movie shows the clouds pulling off the solar disk as the diamond ring faded. The duration was just over two minutes. This series of pictures was scanned from slides done on High-Speed Ektachrome, with exposures from 1/500 to 2 seconds behind a 400mm lens at f/6.3. The final image shows the ending diamond-ring effect.

Still to come: image series of total lunar eclipse on 25 May 1975, partial lunar eclipse of 1972 July 26, eclipsed moon in Sagittarius during eclipse of July 6, 1982, and eclipsed Moon rising behind the Earth's atmospheric shadow on (July 17 1981), Thanksgiving lunar eclipse of November 29 1993 with the Moon, Pleiades, and Hyades.

Last changes: January 2003