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The StoryThere was one downside to the success of the 1994 eclipse -- I'd been bitten by the eclipse-chasing bug. Circumstances prevented me from travelling to the 1995 or 1997 eclipses. But when I saw there was to be a long duration (around 3.5 minutes) eclipse in the western Caribbean, I didn't hesitate. For this trip, I decided to team up with Paul Maley's Ring of Fire Expeditions. Paul is a very active member of IOTA and the Johnson Space Center Astronomy Club, who I first met in Puerto Vallarta prior to the 1991 eclipse. The weather prospects for Curacao looked very promising, and I could also take the opportunity to indulge in some scuba diving (which meant I had to go out and get my Open Water certification first, but that's another story). So I signed up with Paul's group to travel to Curacao. First stop on the way was Houston. I'd originally thought of going to New Orleans, until I discovered that the week before the eclipse was Mardi Gras. This didn't seem like a good time to visit if all you want to do is recover from jet lag, and the hotel prices go through the roof. So I quickly decided to go to Houston instead, and visit the Johnson Space Center. I also got to meet up with Chuck Shaw. Chuck is a well-known ATM who I met at the Texas Star Party in 1996. He and I had spent a few pleasant evenings talking about building telescopes and computerised drive systems, and looking at some of the highlights of the northern sky. (Almost all of the telescopes at TSP spend their time pointing at the southern horizon, looking at Omega Centauri.) Chuck lives just south of Houston and works as a Shuttle Flight Director for the JSC, so I got a great private tour of Mission Control. After a couple of days in Houston, I headed off to meet up with Paul Maley and many of the Curacao party at Houston airport. We then flew to Miami to meet up with the rest of the party, including Josef D. ("") Prall, who was organising the diving for the trip.
The eclipse day started poorly. It was an early start, as we had to drive from the hotel in Willemstad to Westpunt at the north end of the island. And it was overcast with drizzling rain. But as we drove north, the weather started to clear, and the appearance of the sun was met with cheers. The local authorities had organised an observing area for several hundred people at Westpunt. The area was dusty, and exposed to the constant wind. Shipping containers had been stacked into a windbreak to provide some degree of protection, but all the area in front of the wall had already been taken by the time we arrived. We improvised some cover with our buses. The eclipse itself was magnificent. There wasn't a cloud in the sky from before first contact. Totality arrived with a spectacular display of the corona, which showed large equatorial streamers. Through the camera, the polar filaments were particularly pronounced. I managed to get most of my shots off in time -- as before, the eclipse was over far too quickly. Third contact was followed by the celebrations expected after such a success. I took the opportunity to wander over to some of the other groups at the site, to talk with them, compare experiences and to photograph their equipment. It was a great day, except maybe being interviewed by a documentary team. I was covered in dust, my face was sunburnt, and my hair a windblown mess. I can't imagine how I looked! We spent one more day on Curacao, enjoying some more dives. Then off to Miami and Orlando the next day, a visit to the Kennedy Space Center, then home via San Francisco.
The PlanUnlike the 1994 eclipse, I didn't have a definite plan for these shots. Since I was using a longer focal length than previous eclipses, I was going to concentrate on inner corona and prominence shots. I'd also been told that the party would be leaving shortly after totality ended, so decided not to waste film on the final partial phase. (As it turned out, we were still at the site well after third contact.) The EquipmentI was again using my trusty Minolta X700 (actually my fifth, after two earlier ones were stolen in 1992 and 1994, and number four took a dive in the Pacific near Fiji in 1996). This time I decided to use a Minolta 500mm f/8 mirror telephoto lens with a 2x telecompressor to achieve 1000mm f/16 effective. The film was still Fuji Provia 100 ISO. The resulting system was slow, with mid totality exposures out to one second. I took a tracking drive assembly with me, but this failed on the day -- at the low latitude of Curacao, the weight of the lens, camera and motor drive hanging over the front of the drive was too much for the main bearing to take. Pity, since this was several kilos of extra equipment I'd lugged half way across the world, let alone the money that it cost. So, I had to go back to fixed shots from my tripod. The biggest problem I had was getting a reasonable focus during the partial phases -- the combination of a slow optical system, the ND5 solar filter and my right-angle viewfinder attachment meant quite a dim solar image with little contrast for sunspots and other features. Just like the previous eclipse, I found myself constantly fiddling with the focus, never quite sure if I'd got it better or not. I even tried using a focussing mask (a disk with two holes attached over the filter), but it just made the image dimmer and didn't help much. My advice to others: use an ND4 filter with slow photographic systems, and be prepared to adjust the focus once the filter is removed. I didn't, and you can see that the prominences in the short exposures below are not as sharp as they should be. The other problem I had was not being able to rotate the camera to allow the sun to drift along the long axis of the film. Unfortunately, the drift was across the short axis. This is why the longest duration shots have some cropping of the corona. One way to fix this problem is to use a three axis head on the tripod, but these are hard to pan smoothly and quickly if the need arises. That's why I was using a video pan-tilt head on my tripod for this trip. The other solution is to use a system where the telephoto lens is attached to the tripod instead, allowing the camera body to be rotated (hopefully without losing focus). I also took a second camera to attempt some wide field mid-eclipse shots including Venus and Mercury, which were very bright and not far from the sun during totality. This was a waste of time -- it absorbed valuable seconds away from the main camera, and these would have been better invested adjusting the focus before shooting the second half of totality. The PhotosClick on the first of the images below to see an animated GIF of the eclipse (it's 260K). The second is a composite of the two longest exposures, in an attempt to overcome the cropping in the originals.
This table contains the main totality shots. The exposures range from 1/30 second through to 1 second for the two longest exposures (which were shot about 1 minute apart while I tried to capture the planet shots), then 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/15. I'm reasonably happy with these shots, though they don't capture the full glory of what I saw through the viewfinder during totality. Click on a shot to see it full size.
   
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