Picture Gallery 2005

Looking remarkably like Little Weed on stilts (devotees of "Bill & Ben" will know what I'm talking about!) the camera sporting its famous home-made solar filter and sun-shade sits ready on the tripod.	A quick check that everything is aligned correctly before the big event gets underway. Chalk marks placed on the path during a "dry run" certainly helped orientate things on the day!
	And away we go. The beneficial effect of the sun-shade is very obvious, enabling me to operate the camera out of the glare of direct sunlight.
Just to show that my pics would have been fine had Fuji Laboratories not intervened! This shot was taken about 10:30am, well past the maximum phase (at around 10am). The pinkish tinge is, of course, due to the filter. Note that no sun-spots are visible - this was expected, as 2005 is very near the minimum of the sunspot cycle.

Not quite the movie I intended, but here's what I could salvage from the wreckage. The decrease in quality towards the end, as my scanner struggled to extract anything useful from the slides, is painfully obvious. The effect of the moon moving across the sun's disc is, however, quite striking.

The "colander camera" displaying its unusual pattern. Each perforation acts like a pin-hole camera and throws an image of the sun onto the card.	A close-up of the images shows the central circle nicely. It also shows why the pin-hole has to be small: colander-sized holes don't give a very good focus!
And finally, we get to see the real thing. Naturally it goes without saying that my 2001 colleagues had a perfect view! Here's some key shots from their expedition to Tunisia - have a look at the animations as well!
Image (c) Shanta Subba Rao 2005	Image (c) Terry Briggs 2005
The point at which you know you've got the right day! The eclipse begins as the moon takes the first nick out of the sun.	A close-up of the moment when the moon passes fully onto the sun's disc shows the effect of mountains projecting above the limb and blocking out the sun's light for an extra brief instant - see below for further information.
Image (c) Shanta Subba Rao 2005	A beautiful shot of maximum annularity illustrating the "ring of fire" effect.

The Moon's Limb

The moon is, of course, not a perfect sphere: it has mountains and valleys on its surface which make its edge somewhat "serrated" when seen in silhouette. This means that during an eclipse the sun's light is not extinguished at a single instant but is firstly masked by the higher mountains while still shining through the valleys. At a total eclipse this gives rise to the phenomenon known as "Bailey's Beads" but when the eclipse is annular it looks more as if dark filaments are linking the moon's limb to that of the sun.

Image (c) Terry Briggs 2005	Image (c) Terry Briggs 2005
Several minutes before third contact, two adjacent mountain peaks block the sun's light which continues to shine through the valley between.	A little later, the process is repeated at a different place on the limb while light still streams through a large valley: this is actually the point of third contact, illustrating how difficult it is to accurately time the contacts.
Overlaying a representation of the actual contour of the moon's limb (scale highly exaggerated, of course!) on the above images illustrates the point about light being blocked by high spots and shining through valleys as the dark areas really do correspond to peaks and the bright ones to valleys. The location of true third contact is marked by the red circle.