gallery 40 the 2006 total solar eclipse

Gallery XXXX- 3/39/06

"The 2006 Solar Eclipse"

- the total solar eclipse of 2006 from the Libyan desert -

About a year and a half ago, I saw a full page ad in Sky and Telescope for an eclipse cruise to see the total solar eclipse from the Libyan desert. Ann and I planned for this trip for that year and a half. We took the kids out of school for a tour of Pompeii, Syracuse, the pyramids, the eclipse, Leptis Magna, Malta and Peastum. Both History and Astronomy - does it get any better? All this was capped off by a visit to Libya - a country off limits to Americans for years. An eclipse in the desert, amazing. I hope to add some words to this page to describe our adventure, for now I just wanted to post some shots of totality taken by my wife with her digital SLR. I'll have to get the settings. She was using techniques advised by Alan Dyer of Canada (thanks). The tripod was flimsy. It was breezy. Focus was problematic. Ann has never shot any astronomical object before.

Click on the thumbnail in the galley below to get the image. I cropped the images and then scaled to 50% of original size - I may further reduce them to 25-33% to tighten them up further. I "unsharp masked" the first one but gave up after that.

You can see some equatorial streamers and some arcs coming off of the solar poles. Reaching third contact, there are several photos from the diamond ring phase. Not to bad for a beginner in moderate wind on a shaky tripod with no remote shutter release.

observing report - eclipse of 2006 from Lybia

Image gallery: (look for prominences in the later images)