The following animation shows the complete progress of the total solar eclipse
on August 11, 1999. This animation was created using photographs taken with
the MTO 1000a lens. The pictures were photographed with different exposure times
and that enabled me to perfectly capture, one after another, the various phenomena
û diamond ring, Bailey's beads, chromosphere, prominences, corona. This made
it necessary to process the images, before creating the animation, using the
procedure detailed when describing the
chromosphere image processing.
The result is an animation that resembles the human eye's perception more than
one which would only involve showing, one after another, the original images.
As the computer monitor is incapable of displaying the huge contrast required for
an absolutely faithful reproduction of the progress of the eclipse I created
two versions of the animation. The first version attempts to display
the sequence of all visible phenomena (diamond ring, Bailey's beads,
chromosphere, prominences, and corona) as clear as possible. As a result
the image must be very dark at the beginning and at the end of the
eclipse in comparison to the middle part. This is analogous to the strategy
I employed when shooting the eclipse. At the beginning and at the end of the
eclipse I photographed with short exposure times to capture the extremely bright
areas at the solar limb, i.e. Bailey's beads, chromosphere and prominences.
Halfway through the eclipse I used long exposure times to capture well the
faintly glowing corona. The second version of the animation tries to emulate,
as much as possible, the perception during the eclipse at the expense of some
details which may not be so clearly visible as in the first animation. The
second animation intentionally contains a certain amount of scattered light
(caused mainly by diffraction) as perceived by the human eye.
Although the partial eclipse was of only marginal interest to us it rendered
enough material to allow me to create, from all the pictures, an animation of the complete eclipse.
Along with the animations described above I also created
special animations,
which do not illustrate the progress of the eclipse relative to time but show
different structures in the solar corona.
