Pictures of the total solar eclipse of 11 August 1999

Pierre van Baal -- Leiden -- The Netherlands

Observed from 12-14 km south of Landau (near Karlsruhe). Weather conditions: cloudy, with occasional gaps, luckily an extended one from 10 before till 15 after totality. Half an hour after totality rain (lots of it). First picture (projected image with thin clouds moving over the solar disk) shows some small sunspots - but they are hard to spot on the scans (which are at 800 dpi -- twice that for the enlargements). During totality some very thin clouds moved in (particularly visible on the picture with the diamond ring at the end of totality), but these did not block the view of the corona. About 5 prominences were sticking out redish to purple, one was quite high above the surface (perhaps a solar flare). Particularly nice to view through 7X50 binoculars. Traces of them show up in the pictures with 1/500sec exposure time. The film used was Kodak Gold ISO 100, the camera was a Zenith-B mirror-reflex, 400 mm telelens, all pictures taken with f/6.3 (allowed for very nice views through the camera, similar to view through the binoculars).


For more eclipse pictures see the homepages of my colleagues Henk Blöte and Gerard 't Hooft or the solar eclipse site of the Dutch amateur astronomy club.