Observing Notes
from the Tuckahoe Irregulars
A couple of months ago, after listening to me babble about the transit, my wife decided this would be a good excuse for her to arrange a trip to the beach. So she found a hotel in Delaware that was on the beach and made reservations.
We had mostly clear skies, with a good amount of haze over the ocean (but no fog!). The sun popped through the haze perhaps 10 degrees above the horizon.
For a few minutes, it was possible to see the black dot of Venus, naked eye, against the orange disk of the sun naked eye without any filters! At least to my way of thinking, this makes for a double rare event - a hundred year event that can't under most conditions be seen without optical aid of some sort.
So here's about what it looked like via my trusty Nikon FM2, 300mm f/4.5 Nikkor lense, at 1/125 of a second, 200 ISO Kodak color neg film. Scan from the negative. Some minor processing with Paint Shop Pro.
Visual observations with a 4.25-inch f/10 planetary newtonian, Baader solar film, at 212x were outstanding. No "black drop" effect was seen. Seeing was excellent at first, but degraded by 3rd contact. Third contact was easier to "mark" then 4th contact. We were observing with Sue and Steve Rismiller of Ohio. Steve had an H-alpha filter on a small refractor. His announcements of both contacts trailed my white light announcements by a full minute.
Sue, Steve and myself are all total eclipse veterans. Upon first sighting of the sun and the event, we all three experienced a brief moment of "quick, do everything in the next 60 seconds before it's over - bincs, naked eye, H-alpha and white light... whew."
Then we realized we had another hour plus to go.
Clear Skies,
Bob Bunge