How was the eclipse?? Share your experience!

[04Stefan07 (Stefan)]

Woke up DEAD tired this morning at 6:30. Went to bed late due to playing Xbox 360 (Skyrim is so addictive haha) and also trialing some new webcam software which I found.

Had two of my mates over for the event. Best location was at the top of my driveway, had a fantastic view of it all. Being in Melbourne we saw partial (almost 50% covering the Sun) but was still fun and was a fantastic experience because we have never seen one before!

Had my two setups going:

1) Telescope with webcam (webcam wasn't good at capturing the Sun as it was too bright at Prime focus or with a 2x Barlow therefore I asked my mate to hold it up against the 25mm eyepiece and ended up getting 1 zoomed in shot and one non-zoomed). Used SharpCap software with my new modded Logitech Fusion, can't wait to try it out on lunar and planets! After the two videos just had the telescope sitting there looking at the Sun.
2) DSLR (350D with 75-300 lens) time lapses, did around 4 or so batches, around 400 images (in RAW format, all up was around 2.5GB) using 250 exposure and I think it was 400 ISO or 200 I can't remember. Wide angle shots and close angle shots. VERY HAPPY with the shots and a big thank you to Pluto on the forums here for helping me troubleshoot the custom filter I made from his tutorial. The images came out FANTASTIC!

I have the 2 videos to process in registax to make two images and will be making time lapse videos with the DSLR images as well as stills and one that shows all phases of the eclipse.

I will be working on these all day tomorrow and will be posting some of my end results.

How did everyone's morning go??? What did you end up getting?

I am now recording my observations in my log

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

was a lovely morning here in south central NSW. Some high altitude thin cloud moving in and out, but nothing to stop the show. Pinhole projection for me - worked a treat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQzDJwwU3pY

[mithrandir (Andrew)]

What eclipse? You mean the one that started with sunset yesterday and is still going on for Sydneysiders?
SWMBO's niece rang a few minutes ago to ask how I'd enjoyed it. She lives in the hills above Mackay and had a perfect view.

[Garbz (Chris)]

I choked. Had it all setup, telescope with DSLR piggybacking on the back. All perfectly pointed at the sun. Then totality came. And I just stood there and watched.

By the time I went over to the camera to take a photo a cloud had passed over. Missed photographing the one part I dragged all the gear up for, but man it was worth it.

[supernova1965 (Warren)]

Well here is my experience woke at 3pm and we drove to machens beach in Cairns spread out the blow up bed for the wait until the start then the rain started.

We didn't get discouraged got the brolly out and toughened up the sky started to lighten and we could see the chances of our seeing anything look very grim still we stayed and hoped for the best I posted CLOUUUUUUUDS DISAPPEAR ON F/B.

I had my phone with google sky out keeping an eye on the progress as that cloud still hung in there then when the eclipse had reached around 95% the CLOUUUUUUUUD DISAPPEARED and we had an unhindered view of the most incredible thing I have ever seen I think it was all the more special due to the fact that right up till the moment the cloud vanished we all thought that we would miss it.

It made the whole experience seem even more magical then it would have been if there had been no clouds at all.

[axle01 (Alan)]

First photo is a small part of a main beach where we were, it's about 5k long and it was like this from one end to the other.



http://i48.tinypic.com/1e2kq1.jpg


http://i47.tinypic.com/2n81lwh.jpg

[Chris_Jordan]

In Mount Gambier, I used a mirror on a stand in my backyard aimed at the living room wall (easy to aim) which I covered with a piece of paper with a 2cm sized hole in it to make a type of pinhole camera. The image was about 50 cms across, and I got sick of running to reaim the mirror every few minutes. Took some pictures I was happy with, including a few silhouettes of my family members. I was going to put the mirror on the pergola roof, but when I practiced yesterday afternoon the big tree my neighbor owns wasn't casting its shadow there.

[DavidTrap (David)]

Just got home from Cairns.

I was about 150km north west of Cairns. We had a great view, with little effect from some very light high cloud.

One of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It's quite surreal when you take the eclipse glasses off just before the first diamond ring. Before that you can only see an orange crescent. When you take them off your confronted with an almost complete corona. I used some binoculars during totality and the prominences were amazing. Over before your know it unfortunately!

The timing software worked perfectly, although my focus was off by a tad... Makes it easy to justify going to another eclipse! I'll post a couple of photos when I've recovered.

DT

[sil (Steve)]

Here in Canberra I woke up to very disappointing skies...horizon to horizon cloud cover. Still I had my Nikon set up ready to go and stood outside for a while watching the skies. I ended up jumping in a car with someone to see if we could find gaps in the clouds somewhere and heading up towards Lake George I spotted a patch of sunlight on the ground and we headed there.

It was only a short lived gap but it was enough for me to set up, spot the sun and get focus then take a few shots. Then we sat there watching and waiting. Occassionally the cloud thinned enough to get more shots and more often the cloud was just right to show the eclipse clearly without glasses so was able to get some wide angle shots with my compact camera too.

Having never seen a solar eclipse before I was happy to just be able to see part of it, and I ended up with a lot of really nice shots through the solar filter complete with sunspots. All in all the weather could have been much worse.

[Shark Bait (Stu)]

I deciding to head to Redcliffe instead of Mt Coot-tha for Brisbane's Partial Solar Eclipse. I left at 3:30am to watch the sunrise near the jetty.

The weather was near perfect with virtually no sea breeze. I had plenty of time to set up the gear and do some test shots before the show started.

A steady stream of walkers and joggers were doing their morning exercise and most of them were aware of the eclipse. A small group ended up watching from the area that I had set up in and it turned into a small social gathering of locals. One photographer, John and a local teacher, Liat helped out the the observation gear which freed me up to take images through my scope.

A reporter from the local Redcliffe Herald paper had a chat while on her morning walk. She took some photos and put some of my images on the papers facebook page. I doubt they will be published in print but I will know for sure next Wednesday.

http://www.facebook.com/RedcliffeBay...type=1&theater

I missed a magic shot of a plane passing in front of the Sun during the eclipse by a couple of seconds but at least I got to see it happen.

John was taking great photos of the behind the scenes activity. It is interesting to see the setup from anothers point of view. He was really wanting to get images for himself but he did not have the right filters for the job. A copy of my shots will be heading his way.

For some reason the safety messages had not hit home with some people who made the trip to the waterfront to view the eclipse for themselves. One lady was using a folded up sheet of green cellophane. Another bloke used a 2nd hand $2 welders mask that was not the correct rating and some were trying to look at it without any protection at all. As had been mentioned in other threads, camera sales should be up in the local area as lots of CCD's will be fried.

I would have liked to have been in FNQ but am content with an 83% eclipse from Brisbane.

[Paddy (Patrick)]

We were observing from the north end of Four Mile Beach at Port Douglas. An amazing crowd made it feel even more remarkable - especially as everyone was hoping the clouds would be kind to us. We had intermittent views of the ingress and then clouds covered the sun for about 15 minutes before totality. Then a window opened to give a great view of totality. My first total eclipse and nothing could prepare me for how truly amazing it was. One of the few times that I would use the word "awesome"

I was also amazed at how almost everyone left as soon as totality was over. We had great views of the egress and it was amazing to watch through my Ha scope as the moon gradually revealed the detail of the sun.

Wonderful!

[Paddy (Patrick)]

Here is what it looked like. I didn't notice how many phones were being used to record it.

[doppler (Rick)]

I drove to Cairns from Mackay with my daughter on monday. We spent tuesday morning sight seeing and looking for a good vantage point, checked the weather forcasts, the iis forums and wondered if we would actually get to see the eclipse. The BOM forcast predicted clear skys north west of Mareeba so we headed of to Mt Carbine and as we were sleeping in the car travelled about 20kms further west. In a large clearing we met some Japanese tourists and photographers. They were amazed at Australia's dark starry skys (I dont think they relised that our city's night skys are as bad as there's). Anyway the sky was really dark and we showed them some great DSO's. Cars were driving past all night, and after 4.00 am the busses started to come past too. There was some low cloud at the start of the eclipse and some jetstream cloud that cleard by totality. I piggybacked the 102mm refractor on the 200mm reflector so we could take some pics and have look at the same time, that worked quite well. Great time had by all. My daughter has already booked me in for the may 2013 anular eclipse.

[alphamone]

Viewed it from the reef magic cruise on their marine world platform. It was pretty much cloud free from 1st contact to last contact. I got some nice images too, unfortunately, the motion of the platform in the water limited the maximum exposure length, so attempting to capture earthlight or an extended corona was not possible.

Was really nice to be able to see totality after getting clouded out at Shanghai back in 2009. The way it just gets suddenly dark is just impressive.