Partially Lame Solar Eclipse
As far as eclipses go, this partial eclipse in Hawaii was quite lame. The new moon did take a bite out of the old sun, but not as much as I expected. At best this partial eclipse peaked with only about 1/8 of the sun munched away by the traveling new moon (or is the the rotating earth?). Must be a combination of both and all.
I shot the photo series at Kaka’ako Waterfront Park on Tuesday afternoon July 21. It was a bright sunshine filled Hawaii day. Perfect sungazing weather with eye protection of course. The camera I used to get the composite was my trusty old Canon 300D SLR with 70-300 telephoto zoom lens. On top of the lens I mounted a home made sleeve with a reflective mylar patch covering the open end. This is the same stuff used for the sun peeps sold at Bishop Museum.
Fact is I bought a rather large sheet of this material from Bishop Museum in 1991 and created the original sleeves to shoot the total eclipse on the Big Island that year. I have saved all the sleeves and sun peeps since then and have now used them for the 3rd time. The last time I brought these out was for a 2004 partial eclipse that I also shot from Kaka’ako Waterfront Park.
In the photo above, the eclipse images were composited into one frame and color enhanced using Adobe Photoshop. See the original composite here.
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