I know I should wait until September to present my photos for the 'holiday 2008' theme, but I can't resist to post these two photos now!
On August 1 I was in Novosibirsk, Siberia, Russia to observe a total solar eclipse. It was a really exciting experience (and I mean not only the solar eclipse ;-).
The total eclipse lasted 2 minutes, with 'first contact' about an hour before. The sun was partially obscured until about an hour afterwards.
The first image is a crop of a photo taken with my compact camera (canon g9, 12Mp, 6x optical zoom). I used a short exposure time so that you can see the details in the corona. Note that the solar activity is at a minimum and no sunspots were present.
The next image is a composite of some of the many frames I took from the whole period of partial/full eclipse. Obviously the partially eclipsed sun frames were taken with a solar filter (I made a small filter, from cereal box carton and a small piece of Baader AstroSolar (tm) safety film, which I could put easily on the extended lens).
