Annular Solar Eclipse: 2005 April 8

(under construction)

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!

For the 'Hybrid Eclipse' we travelled to Panama, with TravelQuest, where the eclipse was annular.

Site Location (WGS 84)
Longitude: 79 deg. 57 min. 12.8 sec. West
Latitude: 8 deg. 57 min. 12.8 sec. North

Predicted Contact times (mean limb)
1st Contact: 20:56:51
2nd Contact: 22:12:09
Mid-eclipse: 22:12:17
3rd Contact: 22:12:25
4th Contact: 23:18:20
Annularity: 16 seconds
From the photographs, annularity lasted ~ 8 seconds.

It was touch-and-go with the weather, but the clouds were sufficiently broken and thin enough until a few minutes after 3rd contact, to allow us to see the few seconds of annularity. Our location was at a new resort near Coronado, to the south and west of Panama city, along the Transamerica highway. There was a good display of Baily's Beads at second and third contact, but as we were almost on the centre line, we did see an unbroken ring of sunlight around the Moon for about 8 seconds.

Partial phases and general shots were taken on Kodachrome 64, but for annularity I used Kodak High Definition 200 colour negative film. This film has a greater exposure latitude than slide film and good spectral response into the red (i.e. hydrogen alpha!). Due to cloud conditions it was difficult to judge the exposure required and I ended up overexposing the unfiltered Sun. However, with careful scanning and judicious use of Adobe Photoshop I have been able to get some reasonable images.

Nick Quinn

The image on the left is a composite made up of an image of annularity, and one of totality. The totally eclipsed Sun was photographed by Nick Turner aboard the MS Paul Gauguin in the South Pacfic Ocean. The images have been scaled so that the Sun is the same size, clearly showing the difference in apparent size of the Moon as seen from the two locations.

(Click on the image for a larger view)

Back to Eclipse page