A set of photos of the September 13, 2013, partial solar eclipse photographed by Jay Pasachoff from L’Agulhas, the south point of Africa (where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet). The photos were taken with a Nikkor 500-mm lens on a Nikon D600 camera through a Thousand Oaks Optical Co. solar filter (which passes only about 1 part in a million of the incident sunlight). The partial eclipse was a maximum of about 78% in Antarctica, and the 43% coverage of the solar diameter by the moon that was viewed from L’Agulhas was the maximum possible on land outside Antarctica. The percentage coverage diminishes farther north in Africa, petering out about halfway up.
The sky was mostly cloudy but the eclipse was visible between and through clouds for most of the time, especially for a few minutes about 10 minutes in and then for most of the time from about maximum eclipse through the end. Occasionally, the cloud density was sufficient to allow the shape of the eclipsed sun to be visible without even a solar filter, providing the factor of about a million in absorption.
The eclipse observers included:
Jay Pasachoff, Chair, IAU Working Group on Eclipses
Michael Kentrianakis, New York, USA; new Project Manager of the American Astronomical Society’s Eclipse 2017 Project
Robert Lucas, Australia
Noorali Jiwaji, Tanzania
Lesley Paige Campbell, New York, USA
Xavier Jubier, France
hosted by Liesa Schwarzenbek, L’Agulhas, South Africa
email contact: [email protected]
Early views of the 13 Sept 2015 partial eclipse from L’Agulhas, at the southern tip of Africa
Views of the eclipse with the SunWatcher with Active Pixels (SWAP) instrument on the European Space Agency’s PROBA2 spacecraft, based at the Royal Observatory of Belgium with the project headed there by our alumnus Daniel B. Seaton ’01.
Maps by Michael Zeiler, GreatAmericanEclipse.com
See a full set of images and other materials from Williams College’s and Jay Pasachoff’s eclipse expeditions at http://totalsolareclipse.org
Cape Town Press Release: Sept 13, 2015
Michael Zeiler’s maps of visibility of the Sept 13, 2015, partial eclipse
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
DISCOVR Satellite’s Lunar-Occultation Images
composites of Jay Pasachoff’s images made by Muzhou Lu (Williams College ’13, now at University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Ph.D. student in the focus area of Remote Sensing Earth and Space Sciences)
