Wednesday 27 October 2004 as viewed from Washington,
DC
The pictures on this page were obtained with a
Nikon 4500 Digital Camera. The technique used is "Afocal Astrophotography" in which a camera takes photographs while
coupled to a telescope's eyepiece.
My telescope is
a 1979-made Questar. It is a 3.5 inch Maksutov-Cassegrain with a focal length of 1300 mm. It
has a battery-operated Powerguide II that guides the telescope along the Right Ascension coordinate compensating
for the earth's rotation.
I squeezed off 169 "fine" quality shots each 1600 X 1200 pixels in size.
They cover the time period 10:11 pm to 11:51 pm EST which is appropriate since totality was predicted to begin
at 10:23 pm and end at 11:45 pm. The images below are culled from that lot. Below each image is the exposure time and
the approximate time it was recorded.
There is a gap between 10:24 and 11:18
pm when no images could be taken due to heavy clouds that blanketed the ongoing eclipse. Fortunately, I took
shots just after totality had set in as well as sometime during the waning portion of totality before
the action was essentially over. In the latter stretch, the images were obtained at an exposure of 8 s each to render
them visible.
These compressed mirror-reversed images show
the Moon slipping into the shadow cast by the earth ... its passage through the darkness of the umbra ... and,
finally, its emergence from the shadow. Even at totality the Moon has some visibility. It appears rusty or copper-colored
as it reflects sunlight which has been refracted by the earth's atmosphere. When the atmosphere contains particles, such as
those generated by volcanic activity (e.g. Mt. St. Helen's), the coloration on the Moon will reflect that.
