Sunday, June 21, 2020

June 21, 2020 Partial Solar Eclipse

I was initially planning to travel to Chiayi, Taiwan to document the June 21, 2020 Annular Solar Eclipse but unfortunately, due to Covid19 pandemic situation, international travel is very restricted due to very strict quarantine procedures :( So I together with my son KC setup at our roofdeck in Manila, Philippines to document the partial solar eclipse which will start at 3:01pm PST with maximum eclipse of 68% at 4:22PM PST and ends at 5:31PM PST. I set up my Canon EOS M6 mirrorless camera on TV-101 refractor on Vixen GPDX mount while my son use Canon EOS 500D DSLR on Celestron C90 Maksutov-Cassegrain on Nexstar SLT Mount. Eclipse started partly cloudy at around 3:00pm but we were able to play hide and seek with the clouds till 4:10pm PST before we got clouded out and made a final tease for us to make our final image of the eclipse at 4:43pm PST, after more than 20 minutes past maximum eclipse at 4:22pm PST. After that, the clouds shut us down totally till 5:32pm before we end the session and packup. We were also able to see a iridescence colorful cloud formation while we were clouded out at maximum eclipse as a consolation.

Sunday, June 7, 2020

Solar Imaging Session - June 7, 2020

The sky this afternoon is not good and seeing is also bad. I try to image the new AR2765 Sunspot Group in Ha wavelength but encounter bad seeing that virtually is smearing the image although one can still see some bright flaring activity in the smaller pores of this group. I was also able to image the Sun in full disk whitelight but unfortunately got clouded out trying to image the group at high resolution :(

Saturday, June 6, 2020

June 6, 2020 Penumbral Lunar Eclipse

Last June 6th, I went up our roof deck at around 1:00am to observe and document the Penumbral Lunar Eclipse that is visible in our country. I setup my Canon EOS M6 mirrorless camera on Canon EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS L lens set at 400mm f/11 and mounted on Vixen GP-DX mount. First contact occurred at around 01:45am and reaching maximum penumbral phase of 57% at around 03:25am. The southern limb of the Moon near the Tycho crater shows a lightly shaded area. I continue to image the eclipse till around 04:45am before clouds covered up the Moon which by that time is less than 5 deg above the western horizon. I pack up at around 5:00am.