Monday, May 21, 2012

Annular Eclipse in Austin

On May 20, 2012, there was an annular solar eclipse which was only partially visible in Austin.  We thought about travelling to Albuquerque to view the full annularity but the date was too close to our Hawaii trip.  Instead, we used this as an opportunity for final field testing of our portable solar imaging setup which we would be using in Hawaii to view the Venus Transit.

Our major technical difficulty, apart from the usual USB problems with the video camera, was co-aligning the  solar scope and camera lens.  Shot below shows the setup and  partial eclipse image taken well before the sun began to set and degrade image quality