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| Color solar images: shortly after noon, it started out looking like a partial solar eclipse over Taiwan but the Moon continued to eat a larger and larger chunk out of the Sun until it took on the Annular Eclipse appearance shown below. Thick overcast, haze, air pollution and rampant clouds blocked the sun. A solution had to be found for imaging the eclipse. A high tech approach was taken using a series of alternating small telescope sites connected by ISP. |
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| The view at 4:16 pm local time had this maximum coverage. |
WEATHER - At this moment, the sky is cloudy with upper atmospheric haze and low level high speed clouds passing overhead. Normally you would not see the eclipse today.
To continuously watch the annular solar eclipse unobstructed from Taiwan, I put together a small telescope system of localized video networks photographically linked together with video cams to cover the best weather portions of the island. Small telescope locations linked
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| A Celestron 3" Dobsonian reflector FirstScope is the prime telescope used for solar viewing by quickly projecting the sun's image onto a sheet of paper, firmed up by a clipboard. It's easy to stop down the aperture to reduce heat intensity and use a safe solar filter over the front tube. A camera photos the image projected on the paper and corrections are applied with computer image processing to clean up the image and correct for foreshortening effects. Photos taken over a brief period of time are ok but any activity too long will have active heat build up, and could start melting the internal plastic secondary mirror holder or other plastic telescope parts. Photo'ing the clipboard paper is safe but never look through the eyepiece. The setup is ideal for briefly imaging the paper at the final time of maximum coverage during a total Solar Eclipse, at a time of reduced heat. |
include Taipei, Yunlin, Chiay, and Taichung Taiwan. At 4:16 pm local time around maximum, the day darkened substantially and a strong breeze suddenly appeared. Humidity stayed very heavy, temperature stayed exorbitantly hot, and visibility suddenly and unexpectedly increased by 5 to 10 more miles. The observatory tent abruptly began flapping in the wind and I remember thinking it's a good thing it's tied down. The telescopes did not image any solar prominences because the video exposures capturing the phase sequences were not set to do so. Many images were obtained but for brevity only a few are shown here. The entire imaging project was conducted with Apple iMac running MacOS system Catalina @3.4Ghz
