Throwback Thursday: 2009 Total Solar Eclipse

By Kin Enriquez -

I'll be running another series of posts called Throwback Thursday, inspired by those Throwback Thursday posts in Facebook and Instagram. On them I will be featuring specific, one-off events  I witnessed during my travels.
The first one will be the 2009 total solar eclipse,  witnessed in Jinshanwei, China, a city is located about 100 kilometers from Shanghai. I was part of the science expedition organized by the University of the Philippines Astronomical Society, which I am a member of since college. 


 The photo* above was a composite image of multiple exposure shots I took during the total solar eclipse. 

This picture is not an underexposed image. This is an actual photo during the totality.

Total solar eclipses are rare events. It happens when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, fully blocking the sun's disc. It will cause total darkness in the location of where it can be seen, for a few minutes. The eclipse that we witnessed happened on July 22, 2009, with  the totality occurring at about 9:43 am. Total darkness lasted for five minutes and 58 seconds. The eclipse is the longest in 21st century.
Our Chinese guide, testing the Mylar film spectacles used for viewing the eclipse

The weather was fickle during the event, with storm clouds covering the sky two minutes before the totality, but the darkness was so apparent once the moon covered the sun, as can be seen from the video.



 Each of us in the expedition has a task to do. Some were in-charge of the telescope, fitted with a ND5 Baader film, other doing the timing and observation using the pinhole method. I was doing multiple exposures of the eclipse using a DSLR camera, with each exposure timed and taken every few seconds.
Peering through the camera moments before the start of the eclipse

I also grabbed my camera when totality set in to take photos and a video of the scene. Aside from the darkness there was a noticeable drop in temperature as the sun was covered by the moon. 

 The months of preparation was well worth the five minutes of totality that we observed, and were able to communicate the results of our observations back to our peers in Manila. 

*Technical details: Pentax * ST-DL, 45mm focal length, f4.5, exposure times vary between 0.3 and 1 second due to changing cloud cover; neutral density 5.0 Baader AstroSolar filter. Post-processing by Bamm Gabriana.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Golden Tara of Agusan

By Kin Enriquez -
Image
One of the main reasons why I am always drawn to museums when I travel is that I would want to see, in real life, the fascinating things that I've only read in books or have seen in the films, such as archaeological artifacts or the paintings of Van Gogh and Dali . Museums give you access to all that. I majored in History when I was an undergraduate in the University of the Philippines. As such, I am always excited to see artifacts and historical curiosities that I encounter during my travels. But sometimes, they also make me sad, like when I saw the Golden Tara of Agusan in the Field Museum in Chicago.  The reverse of the Golden Tara The Golden Tara is a gold statue of a Hindu-Malayan deity discovered in 1917 in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur, in southern Philippines. Weighing about four pounds, the 21-karat gold statue depicts a woman deity sitting cross-legged, ornamented with a headdress and various accruements in the arms and legs....
Read more

Off the Beaten Track: Mapun, Tawi-Tawi

By Kin Enriquez -
Image
Guest post by Mara Ione Sarail Mapun? Where is that?” I get this question a lot when people ask me about my hometown. I’d ramble on and on the island (its location and the culture and the pretty spots...) but since the place is not really in any of the Philippines tourist spots and is in the middle of nowhere, I might as well talk about Atlantis instead. But the island does exist.  Mapun Tawi-Tawi or Cagayan de Sulu) is an island municipality in the Sulu Sea on the southwestern extreme of the Philippines, located very close to Sabah. Or from the way I see it on the Philippine map, the island is located on the Philippine’s “armpit”. Mapun is a volcanic island. The picture above shows Mt. Nanggoy, an inactive volcano near the Sapah Lake. The most popular tourist attraction in Mapun would be the three crater lakes on the west part of the island. Legend says that the three lakes were once volcanoes that erupted together. The first two, Danao and Singuwang, b...
Read more

How To Track Your Travels with Google Location History

By Kin Enriquez -
Image
Ever traveled to a place then forgot the name of that small shop that sells the best tasting cronuts you've ever had? Or have you ever wanted to retrace your steps in your travels, down to the smallest alleyways you passed along the way but couldn't? Here's a travel tool that enables you to do that - so well that it's cool and scary at the same time: the Google Location History. I use the service - which you need to enable on your mobile phone and Google account - to look back at my travels and generate some cool maps that retrace my steps during my trips. Google Maps, by itself, is an incredibly useful app already; I cannot count how many times I've used it when traveling to find my hostel, the nearest subway station, that cronut place. Having location history enable, made it cooler and more useful. Take a look at these examples: The top photo shows my movements around Singapore during my trip there in September, It basically showed my movements in t...
Read more