OK - I'm getting this together. First up my friend took a video with his iPad. Here are some screengrabs at various times towards totality. The camera sort of captures the way the colour leached out of the world before going to darkness for totality. 10 minutes before is about 90% coverage and 2 minutes before is about 98% (I think...)
comparisons.jpg
The corona is almost impossible to photograph as the dynamic range is so great. I have taken a series of stills that I'm attempting to combine. Here's some pictures with a short and longer exposure showing the detail visible close to the sun and the extent of the corona.
In this short exposure you can see a prominence to the top right of the sun. If I have my sums right a quick estimate based on the diameter of the sun puts it about about 25,000 miles long.
eclipse short.jpg
This exposure captures most (it's bigger in real life) of the extent of the corona.
eclipse long.jpg
Also the colours are right as sky is a twilight blue in real life and the corona more of a pearly white and you perceive details along it's entire length. Basically I'm saying "You had to be there"
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OK - With my limited photoshop skills I've tried to combine some of the exposures I took to produce an images that (I think) more closely resembles what you experience at the time.
Composite (Large).jpg
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Wow, Chris!!!! I know "AWESOME" has been used, but it's the only word coming to mind! Great shots!
My pinhole view into a cardboard box is awfully silly compared to that! Not put together yet because PrePro has been telling me that my scratch discs are either write protected or unavailable for a while now. I think I fixed it today by pressing the Alt key while opening PrePro. I had already agreed to let the program use My Documents. Ha! My tiny C drive is almost full. I've changed the preferences settings now. Sure hope I'll be able to view old projects that are still in the works. I have one that says the scratch disc path uses the R drive. I don't have an R drive. ummmmmm
Neat to see the path, Bob! Thanks!
Whatever you do, don't set your coffee cup adjacent to your turps cup.
A day or so after the eclipse there was a program about it on TV while I was loading the dishwasher. General gist: Back in the 1800s "scientists" were using brand spanking new technology at the time, a spectrograph, to measure colors from the sun's corona during an eclipse. The expected colors were there but also an additional, unknown green color band. The guys wondered if the sun contained an element completely unknown on Earth. Eventually they figured out that the green band represented iron with some of the molecules missing, probably due to the extreme heat.
I believe they said the temperature of the surface of the sun is about 10,000 degrees F. A home oven usually reaches 500F. Bricks are fired at about 1800 to 1900 F. Porcelain is fired at about 2300 F. So 10,000 is a lot cooler than I thought the sun would be.... BUT the heat in solar flares is much, much, hotter than the sun's surface with a range from around 360,000F to well over 2 million degrees F!
During this eclipse some guys were testing again, with dual airplanes leapfrogging one another in an effort to get a long exposure. Apparently a couple, maybe three, minutes is all that is possible from a single location. They want to examine this information to study the heat levels coming from the sun and to try to predict the how and why of solar flares, which have the ability to wreak havoc on electric grid systems on Earth and during an eclipse is the only time the corona can be measured.
