Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2017/08/29
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I enjoy Larry Z?s post and his intellect and interesting high tech
experience but it seems whenever something goes up against photography,
biking or astronomy, photography goes by the wayside.
A very cheap point and shoot he used on his very high tech bike if I recall.
Not everyone has to have photography as a serious hobby. There's no law.
People seem to feel like they should act like its neck in neck with the
rest of their life when it?s not even close.
--
Mark William Rabiner
Photographer
On 8/23/17, 2:38 AM, "LUG on behalf of Howard L Ritter Jr"
<lug-bounces+mark=rabinergroup.com at leica-users.org on behalf of hlritter
at twc.com> wrote:
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Eclipse/
<http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/hlritter/Eclipse/>
As a lifelong amateur astronomer and photographer, I sympathized with
Larry Z?s recent advice to forget about photographing the eclipse and just
watch it.
As a lifelong amateur astronomer and photographer, I felt free to ignore
the advice!
My son and I drove from Raleigh and Charlotte to the town of Murphy,
where the path of totality would cross the extreme SW corner of North
Carolina. Weather turned out better than predicted: Hardly a cloud to be
seen, and not one on the face of the Sun until 5 seconds after the Moon
fully departed it.
To supplement the visual enjoyment, I brought my 100-mm binocular
telescope with eyepieces for 21x and metal-on-glass filters to go over the
objective lenses. These came off at totality for what turned out to be a
spectacular view of the Sun?s corona and numerous prominences rising up past
the silhouette of the Moon. I also brought my Nikon D810A with an 80-400
Nikkor zoom equipped with a similar filter. I did experience some
frustration trying to get good focus with the camera, and I wonder whether
the quality of the glass filter was not good enough to match the native
performance of the lens. There is a neutral-density glass filter with nearly
the same optical density as this reflective filter, and I?m tempted to try
it just to see if I can get better detail on the Sun.
In any case, the experience of watching a total eclipse of the Sun was
every bit as spectacular and ethereal as I?d hoped it would be. I?d seen
numerous partial eclipses, and I can tell you that no partial eclipse of
less than 99% or so prepares you for that happens as that last 1%
disappears, and nothing at all about a partial eclipse even resembles the
sight of totality. During the partial phase there?s a dark bite out of the
Sun in a bright sky, but as the last sliver of Sun disappears, the level of
illumination drops precipitously and dramatically, and the winking out of
the last remnant is like?no, it?s NOT like anything else. The whole world
goes dim, fast and shockingly. And whereas the partially eclipsed Sun of
practically any degree still looks like a brilliant spot too bright to look
at in a blue sky, the eclipsed Sun is totally different. There?s now a
glowing nimbus surrounding a terrifying black hole where the Sun used to be,
none of which was visible until totality. It?s other-worldly and sinister.
We?re used to seeing nothing change in real time in the heavens, just slow
day-to-day changes and a constant, reliable Sun. In the last seconds before
totality we see the actual movement of heavenly bodies and then the
obscuration of the Sun, and it?s too massive and overpowering and beyond
human scale to understand or tolerate with a placid mind. No wonder the
ancients were terrified of these things!
I got a few good shots, and one bystander who asked if he could take a
picture through the binoculars with his iPhone got a one-in-a-million shot ?
as well as proving that decent images of the event could be gotten this way.
?howard
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