366 Days of 2012, Day 320 - Celestial Cookie Monster

In 2002 I experienced my first total solar eclipse. It was only a short 30 seconds of totality but from that moment I was hooked!

Although I could not be in Cairns this year and am envious of my friends who were, I was not going to miss the opportunity to capture my own little piece of the occasion.

At 7:30am today the light was strange, it was like the dimmed light of a sunset or a sunrise but without that characteristic yellow cast. This light was the same colour as normal daylight but palpably subdued. If you had no idea what was going on you'd be forgiven for feeling a little edgy. Perhaps this weird light would have been more pronounced had the partial eclipse been in the middle of the day.

Capturing this image was surprisingly easy. Hand-held, point and shoot. The fast shutter speed meant no issues with camera shake but even with the tiny aperture and fast shutter speed I still needed to reduce the light by more than 500 times with a neutral density filter. Using full manual I aimed to ensure no content in the image was brighter than 1 full stop back from maximum. I wanted to capture as much detail of the Sun's surface as possible including any visble sunspots. Any half reasonable DSLR camera would have been fine.

This image is from the last third of the Moon's transit across the Sun's face, a point where the chunk removed was a close as I could get to matching a quarter piece. Like the bite of a giant Cookie Monster from a Celestial Gingernut Biscuit complete with texture and Sun spots.


Photo: Robert Rath, '366 Days of 2012, Day 320 - Celestial Cookie Monster'. 1/8000s f/32 ISO50 400mm + 9StopND Filter