| I'm no expert on eclipse photography. But
25 years ago when I was a budding astronomer (and just before I gave it up for geophysics),
I did venture north from my house in Boston to stake out a place in Nova Scotia from
which I could view and photograph the coming solar eclipse. We had with us a Sky
& Telescope map of the eclipse path and a Rand MacNally road map. Cruising the
north side of Nova Scotia, we decided to settle into a place with the unfortunate
name of Malignant Cove (radioactive fish, maybe?). My overly ambitious plan was to
photograph the eclipse with a 500 mm lens on a Nikon and to shoot a 6x9 sheet film
image through a Questar. Well, with neither piece of glass being automatically guided
and with only a rough idea of what the exposure should be (don't remember what I
used), that minute or so of totality passes mighty quickly. I blew through a complete
36 exposure roll on the Nikon, took a millisecond to just look up an appreciate the
beauty of it all, then headed for the Questar. My mistake was in deciding to recenter
the image, and by the time I clamped everything back down, totality was over. These
three images through the Nikon were the best ones of the lot. I had never seen a total solar eclipse before this one, and never have seen one since. Many thanks to my friend Ron Cook who tracked down the actual date of this eclipse for me. |
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| Camera: Nikon FTN with cable release |
Exposure: no idea |
| Lens: Nikon 500 mm f8 mirror-lens |
A big tripod of unknown make |
| Film: Kodak High Speed Ektachrome (ISO 160) |
PhotoCD scans of the original slides |
