SOLAR ECLIPSE
of
AUGUST 11, 1999
(continued)

On the decks of Marco Polo




My grandson Ryan Baker, Me and my son Duncan.
The Pentax and the 800 mm lens are in the foreground.


As the moon cuts into the image of the sun, shadows through small apertures become crescent shaped,

At the last moments before second contact (the beginning of totality) the shadow of the moon rushes toward the ship.

During totality the entire horizon glows with sunset colors.
The captain of one of these two ships must not have cared if his passengers enjoyed the darkness of the eclipe!

To photograph the eclipse I used the same Vivitar lens of 800mm focal length with an aperture of f8 (thus the objective is 100 mm or 4 inches diameter), coupled to a Pentax Spotmatic single lens reflex camera as I used at the eclipses of 1970, 1973 and 1998. The film was Kodacolor Gold 800. I did not note the exposures accurately, but they probably ranged from 1/250 to 1/1000 second. The film was processed aboard MV Marco Polo and later scanned with an HP Photosmart scanner.

Photographs are no more than a reminder of an eclipse. Here are four treatments of the scanned negatives of this eclipse, which may give a slight impression of some aspects of the experience(click on the images for a larger scale):

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My Other Total Solar Eclipses (1932-1998)

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