Solar Eclipse Visible from Ireland - 20th March 2015

Standard Toaster

Pretty incredible.

http://www.astrophoto.fr/eclipse-iss-20150320.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwjvduR3_Ho

shedweller

^^^^^
How the hell???

endacl

shedweller wrote: »

^^^^^
How the hell???

TIE fighter crossing the sun at the same time as the eclipse.

Happens all the time.

Calibos

shedweller wrote: »

^^^^^
How the hell???

Thierry Legault is famous for ISS photos, both high resolution detail shots and transits like above. He'd have a piece of software that tells him the long/lat to be to image a given transit. So he would have selected a solar ISS transit in the software and told it the time of the eclipse and the software would spit out the range of Long/lat he'd have to be at to image the transit. If those transit locations were on land and were within the eclipse zone then he was good to go. Turned out they were. In this case Portugal and southern Spain I believe.

jfSDAS

Thargor wrote: »

I have an Astromaster 90 AZ Refractor, is there any filter I can buy or make to drop over that to view the corona and flares etc or do I need one of those $$$ solar scopes?

You'll need one of the specialised h-alpha filters or solar scopes to see prominences Thagor. I know of at least one person in Ireland who did drastic surgery on a refractor and used a h-alpha filter (amongst other bits 'n' bobs) to build themselves a proper solar scope. It was a good bit cheaper than buying a dedicated solar scope but is a procedure not for the faint-hearted ... also, the manufacturers don't like the technique being advertised!

The Sun's corona is a million times fainter than its disk and requires an instrument called a coronagraph. Some are in amateur hands but it is a big project requiring precision instrumentation and ultimately a superb observing site. "The Observer's Guide to Astronomy" by Patrick Martinez has a chapter on building and using a solar coronagraph.

But I wonder what would happen if I could apply a precicely-sun-disc-obliterating fully opaque dot to each side of the glasses (or to one side, then look through one eye)...could I make my own total eclipse?

Interestingly, the idea of trying to obliterate the sun's disk is how a coronagraph works. It uses a number of irises adjusted to filter out stray light and also an occulting disk to block the sun itself.

John

nomdeboardie

jfSDAS wrote: »

...
Interestingly, the idea of trying to obliterate the sun's disk is how a coronagraph works. It uses a number of irises adjusted to filter out stray light and also an occulting disk to block the sun itself.

John

Ha, thanks...I knew I should have done a bit of research to see if this was ‘a thing’, but it’s one of those things for which it would be hard to generate sufficiently specific search phrasings

B17G

A tad late I know, but a couple of images. 4 1/4 reflector (a very old one), images projected on to the ceiling. Was in west Mayo, cloudy for most of the time, but the clouds thinned out for the last few minutes.