The Partial Solar Eclipse - 29th March 2025

 

Time-lapse rendition of the 2 hour long eclipse.
Captured by Pip Stakkert using the Seestar S30. 

The Sun's Disc in eclipse at approximately 10:30am.
Captured with the 66mm. Altair Lightwave ED Refractor with an Observatory engineered (Jolene MqSquint-Fleming) 'white light filter'. QHY5iii462c planetary camera with IR cut filter double stacked with a red light filter. Credit: Kurt Thrust.

"The whole Jodrell Plank Observatory Team 'assembled' for the partial solar eclipse, which 'did not disappoint'. As regular readers of the blog will appreciate, the weather here on the coast in Lowestoft is not always 'great' for astro-imaging. The morning of the eclipse dawned fine and remained so until about 12:00, when the Moon left the solar disc. The cloud did build up over the two hour 'eclipse period' and required the time-lapse video, from the Seestar S30, to be reverse processed by: first, the conversion of the video into a series of still frames, second, the removal of frames worst affected by the cloud and third, the reanimation of the stills to create an 'animation Gif' ".

The detailed image above shows sunspots, faculae and surface granulation of the solar photosphere. It also clearly shows the Moon's limb together with undulations created by the uplifted rims of craters, which happened to be located there, when the data was captured. This image was created from three short video sequences. One for the Solar Northern Hemisphere and the second for the Southern. These videos were captured immediately prior to the start of the eclipse. The third very short video was captured at 10:30am, whilst the eclipse was underway. Software was used to convert videos one and two into a still image of the whole Solar disc. The still image of the eclipse, converted from third video clip, was then added to the complete solar disc". - Joel Cairo CEO of the Jodrell Plank Observatory.

Eclipse at about maximum ( partial disc) -sunspot group 4046 visible top left