Category Archives: Eddington Experiment

I was lucky to have ended up at this observing location with such excellent weather. When planning to view total eclipses, I am advised to arrange for other activities as well; the eclipse itself is subject to fickle viewing conditions … Continue reading →

It is a bit disappointing to be unable to show a clear gravitational signal, even with all of the successful exposures that were taken, but I recognized the difficulty of this measurement early on. In addition to the variables I … Continue reading →

I was able to obtain 35 photos during totality that were candidates to locate stars in the field. The exposures ranged from 1/60 to 2 seconds, but it became clear after applying the detection procedure starPos.m, that only the longest … Continue reading →

This was written prior to eclipse day as I was contemplating how to compare the two image sets.  I include it here to keep the thought sequence intact.   When we apply steps EE-1, 2, and 3 to both the … Continue reading →

I encountered a report about the predicted corona and wondered how it would compare to what we actually saw.  I do not know the orientation of either the simulation or of my image (where is the solar north pole?).  Are these … Continue reading →

The good weather held and we had zero clouds and negligible smoke for the eclipse.  Temperatures were climbing in the bright morning sun, but stalled and then dropped during the partial phases of the eclipse– enough that we donned our … Continue reading →

We now have a way to transform the stars detected in an image into our virtual camera reference frame, but the previous step was just the “rough alignment” based on two bright stars. This is vulnerable to errors in how … Continue reading →

Unexpected errors while looking for the best angular fit between the imaged stars and their reference locations.   My early efforts to map the imaged stars onto their virtual camera positions showed unexpected errors. They were close, but displayed error … Continue reading →

The field of view for my EOS60Da APSC sensor (inner rectangle) and the EOS6D full-frame sensor (middle rectangle). The map overlay is the view from Idaho Falls on the day of the eclipse as displayed by Stellarium (and inverted to … Continue reading →

It seems easy to locate stars in an astrophotograph: they are the bright dots. I am recording images of the sky with my Canon EOS 60Da. It has a resolution of 5184 x 3456 pixels (after demosaic) in each of … Continue reading →