Technical Details

PHOTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION

All the images were taken through an old second hand Olympus OM1. A 300mm lens was used for all the images of the eclipse. 300mm is not too big but still gives a reasonable sized lunar/solar image on a standard print.

A BAADER AstroSolarTM Safety Film filter was used for the partial phases. (Thanks to another eclipse observer Ken Wright who lent me the filter). This cut down the light by a factor of 100,000. The diamond ring and total phases were without any filter.

The lens and camera were mounted on a tripod and aligned to the sun by casting a shadow onto my hand. It is impossible to see anything (other than the sun) through the viewfinder once the filter is in place.

The film used was bog standard Kodak 100 ASA colour film. You do not need any special film for solar eclipses!

Exposures were all 1/125 second at f/16 for all the partial phase in conjunction with the solar filter. The filter gives a purple hue which was digitally corrected later.

The first diamond ring image was 1/500 second at f/32, the second ring was a quick stop down after the total phase and I think 1/500 at f/16. No filters were used for the ring images.

The total phase showing the corona used bracketed exposures between 1/25 and 1/30 second at f/8 which shows the corona well. However the prominences are not visible on any of my photographs. Next time I will try extra shots at lower exposures of around 1/500 second at f/16 or f/32. No filter was used for these images.

The next step is to get the film processed and this is where even with perfect negatives the pitfalls can occur. Most prints are done by machine, this has two problems with eclipse and astronomical photographs. Automatic printing machines detect the edge of a 35mm frame and then find the average light level to produce a standard print. When your photo is a bit of white in the middle of a black background then modern technology fails and can give prints that are off centre and far too light. However your local photo printer can over ride this and centre your images by hand and also print your photographs darker.

COMPUTER PROCESSING INFORMATION

The prints were scanned into an AMIGA 1200 computer at 300 dpi using a Umax scanner and Photoscope software. The area selected gave a 1024x768 Jpeg image in most cases..

The images were cropped and scaled to more web friendly sizes using Image Studio. The colour correction to the solar images because of the filter hue was also done with Image Studio. The composite images were created with Draw Studio. Other image processing was achieved via ImageFX4.

The AnimGIF was created from photographic images. A little cheating was necessary as only the first part of the partial phase was photographed and only the second diamond ring fully captured. The available images were flipped to get their missing counterparts.
ImageFX was used to crop all the images to the same size and align them using its light table feature. The images were down-scaled and converted to 128 colour GIFs using Image Studio. The single GIFS were converted to an AnimGIF using WhirlGif.
Of course the timing is unreal, the partial phase lasts about an hour either side and totality only two minutes. If I had used real time blink and you would miss the total part of the anim. I have though emulated the eye's adaption to darkness by using a more exposed image in the middle of the three frames that cover the total phase !

Data for the eclipse and the computer generated animations for download were courtesy of Digital Universe.

Not one single application by Microsoft was used.

WEB PAGE CREATION DETAILS

The pages were created using a plain text editor Golded which has fairly comprehensive WWW extensions and viewed/tested using IBrowse for the Amiga but should work on any browser.

The pages were uploaded using Dopus FTP a feature of the Amiga Workbench replacement Directory Opus. Instead of loading an FTP programme remote sites are just treated like any other directory on your hard drive.

Not one single application by Microsoft was used.

Voyager for Amiga (Demo version)

IBrowse 2 for Amiga.

Mac 68k version of Netscape 3. Netscape does not like the use of images as a table cell background but otherwise works OK.

Mac 68k version of Explorer 3. This does not like centering as part of the TABLE tag so tables have been centered externally using CENTER.

The Mac software was tested on my A1200 using FUSION to emulate a 68060 Quadra Macintosh.

I have been informed, but not checked myself, that Netscape and IE5 on the PC show the pages with no problems.

Though unlikely, if anyone has problems with other browsers on other platforms then please let me know.