Total Solar Eclipse March 29 2006

 

Text Box: Turkey! In March of 2006, we joined an organized trip hosted by Kandilli Observatory and run by Der-tur on a 12 day excursion in Turkey. I convinced a number of friends locally on the recommendation of my friend Alan Whitman, and our numbers mounted to 15 as others joined us in Turkey. Turkey was great! I wouldn't have believed that I would enjoy Istanbul, all 16 million strong as much as I did. Great and interesting city and we want to go back. The historical and archaeological sites in Turkey were worth the price of admission and we got the eclipse to boot. For a sampling of our trip click here. For the eclipse day, our hotel was the Sural Surai in Side/Manavgat on the Mediterranean coast. It was a 5 star all inclusive hotel, and you can’t get much better than that. The hotel site was gorgeous with palm trees, tennis courts, nice pools and of course a lovely beach where we were to partake of the eclipse. We had seen the eclipse in Aruba from the inner courtyard of our hotel from which we could not see the Caribbean sea or the horizon. I later saw a video of the advancing moon shadow, a breath taking and dramatic event and I didn’t want to miss out on it again. The beach also was where our kids wanted to play so it worked well both ways. One of our members had a William Yang Megrez 80 which came to grief on our bus tour. It seems that the lens retaining ring can back out under the vibration as experienced on the baggage stowage rack on a bus. We discovered this in the dress rehearsal the day before the eclipse! We had to reassemble the lens and guess the order and arrangement of the lenses and then reassemble the scope. Almost got it right, but it worked well enough to do the eclipse. By the way, the lenses did experience some minor chipping in the incident. Eclipse day was a special occasion coinciding with our guide Hassan’s birthday! He hadn’t been too excited by the eclipse, but after a week with 15 eclipse chasers, the enthusiasm and anticipation had rubbed off on him. He eventually asked to buy an Edmund Scientific Astroscan from one of our members, Alan Whitman. (and did) I shot and viewed the eclipse through a Takahashi Sky 90 and Extender Q with the aid of a Meade 647 flip mirror unit for which I had made a 2” tube to SCT adaptor. It plugged into the Sky 90 and a 24 panoptic provided wonderful views of the event, then with a flip of the mirror I could shoot prime focus with my Canon Rebel xt. The eyepiece and the camera were setup parfocal, and I could remove the camera to take terrestrial shots and then put it back onto the 647 and continue to shoot the sun. The focus withstood these trifilings with no problems! Those of you who know the Sky 90 will recognize the Extender Q which increases the short scope to 800 mm focal length and corrects the fast doublet’s residual aberrations. Nice! The rugged edge of the moon against the background of the sun was crisp and well defined. I mounted this great mass of equipment on a Takahashi Teegul to track the sun during the event. Please see the equipment page to see more details on the equipment. Totality was attained without any weather anxiety. The moon hid the last vestiges of the sun and a couple of big prominences greeted us. The delicate structure in the corona and the extent of the corona always strikes me. Beautiful and majestic. The all too soon the sun spills over the edge of the moon and it is over! This one lasted 3:45 and it still seemed to go in no time at all. Sural Surai

 

View of the beach from hotel roof

 

Our site and equipment

360 degree sunrise/sunset     10mm f4 & Rebel xt

Totality

 

 

 

 

 

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Copyright © 2006 Murray D. Paulson