Friday, August 25, 2017

November 2016 Supermoon Revisited

I just dug up a super moon blast from the past. Last November, we went to the south end of Bonaire to watch the Super Moon rise up behind the Willemstoren lighthouse. I used an iPad app to predict where we needed to stand so that the Moon would rise behind the lighthouse. You could have knocked me over with a feather when the Moon did exactly that, rose up right behind the lighthouse and then disappeared behind a cloud bank, grrr.

Here is a short sequence of images.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Eclipse from Bonaire

We still have our eclipse glasses from the total eclipse that we saw here on Bonaire back in the day.  So we invited a number of people to swing by the house Monday afternoon to do some eclipse gazing.  Sharing our three glasses worked fine.  Much like looking at the hands of a clock, we couldn't see the Moon's shadow actually moving across the face of the Sun, but if we checked back every five minutes or so, we could see that the shadow had indeed moved.

It was raining about an hour before eclipse time, which had me worried that we'd get clouded out, but we were able to view the whole eclipse through breaks in the clouds.  As the afternoon wound on, the skies got progressively clearer.

Below is a montage of pictures of the eclipse as seen in my C-90 telescope.  I would have liked to take the pictures at regular intervals, but was limited to the gaps in the clouds.


Below is one of the images at a larger size so you can see some of the sunspots.  The sunspots created a frame of reference that made it easy to track the progress of the shadow.


This last picture is not from Bonaire!  TWR missionaries, the Pedersens, happen to be in the States visiting their sponsors right now, and cleverly set up their travel itinerary to place them in the path of totality.  Ten year old Rachel snapped this picture of the Corona and Bailey's Beads with her trusty Canon SX30-HS camera.  Great shot Rachel!