Partial solar eclipse from Sydney

Today, 10th May 2013, the combined movements of the Sun, Earth and Moon gave us a very nice Annular Solar Eclipse. Following a similar path to the Total Solar Eclipse we enjoyed last November, the shadow of the Moon over the Earth moved from North Australia to the Pacific. However, today the Moon was close to its maximum distance to the Earth (planets and satellites move following elliptical orbits) and hence its apparent size on the sky was not big enough to completely cover the disc of the Sun. This is indeed the reason the eclipse was an annular solar eclipse.

In this occasion I couldn’t travel to North Australia to enjoy the annular eclipse (actually, I have seen 2 of these in the past, the most recent one was on 3rd October 2005 from Madrid), and even last night I didn’t expect to do anything special about this today. But this morning, while watching it from my backyard using my solar glasses, I decided just to take some few shots using not the telescope but only the tele lens. This is the result:

Partial Solar Eclipse from Sydney. Data obtained using a CANON EOS 600D, a 250mm Tele Lens and a Solar filter (which I hold by hand). I stacked 12 individual frames obtained at ISO 100, f10, 1/80 s using the Lynkeos software. The final processing was achieved using Photoshop. 10 May 2013 @ 09: 10 AEST ( 00:10 UT ), Sydney, Australia.
Credit: Ángel R. López-Sánchez (Australian Astronomical Observatory / Macquarie University, Agrupación Astronómica de Córdoba / Red Andaluza de Astronomía)

I hope you like it.