Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Indonesia's Solar Eclipse

I live in Jakarta, which is several degrees away from the path of the solar eclipse; however, I could get a pretty satisfying shot of a partial eclipse. All photos taken with my Canon EOS 600D, though I must set the ISO to 100, the minimum, for least sensitivity, then set the shutter speed all the way down to 1/4000 seconds, and the aperture at the smallest, at 1/32 to f/36. After that, I needed to edit the brightness and contrast in Adobe Photoshop.


The Sun during maximum covering, at around 7:21 AM. The path taken of the complete eclipse is at Bangka, up to Kalimantan and Sulawesi. The eclipse happens when the Sun is covered by the darkest shadow of the Moon--the umbra. Where Jakarta lies, it is only partially covered by the umbra.


It's a partial eclipse; it wasn't dark as night. And as the Sun is still shining, though at a fraction of its strength, it was still painful to look at for long, even through my camera, behind my car's window which is covered in film.

Oh, and I have no idea why people still think this is bad for your health, unless viewing it directly for prolonged periods of time. Some poor souls were compelled to stay at home. Now: what is the difference between looking directly at the sun and a half-covered Sun? If anything, the eclipse makes it a little bit friendlier to the eyes.


There we go, the moon retreats. The Moon orbits the Earth at an angle, thus a new moon only rarely happens when that orbit lines up with the Sun. Until 2042, we'll never see this phenomenon in Indonesia again.

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