02 July 2019 Total Solar Eclipse Images

This past July’s Total Solar Eclipse was a southern hemisphere event with most of the path over the open waters of the Pacific. Starting east of New Zealand, the eclipse path made continental landfall in Chile and crossed over some major astronomical facilities in the Elqui Valley before entering Argentina. With the Sun setting and close to the horizon the shadow path crossed Argentina in just 3-minutes. The centerline just missed the capital city of Buenos Aires.  

On July 2, 2019, Wijaya Sukwanto, from Indonesia,  was set up near the eclipse centerline, in Villaseca, Coquimbo, Chile  His dual-scope setup included a Thousand Oaks filtered Tele Vue- 76 equipped with a Tele Vue Sol Searcher, and Tele Vue 3.5″ extension tube to handle the Tele Vue  2x & 4x Powermates he was using to image through a Canon EOS 60 DSLR.

It was his 3rd eclipse experience. He wrote us,”This time, the eclipse looks larger and very detailed. The corona color was bit yellowish because it was close to sunset. Overall, this is one of the best of all.”

Also in Coquimbo, Pekka Rautajoki from Finland was in the town of Peralillo to sketch the eclipse. He told us that the totality sketch, made by viewing through an unfiltered TeleVue-85 at 23x, was done “rather quickly” during the short 2’ 27” of totality that began at 12:38:36 UTC. On his Instagram account he says he “also observed clear shadow bands both before and after totality, the first diamond ring, and Sirius and Venus during totality. A magical experience!”

This Week in Apollo History

Apollo 11, launched July 16, 1969, made the historic first manned landing on the Moon with the Lunar Module named Eagle. We take this as proof that the simulator work that Al did must have been pretty good!