Partial Eclipse of the Sun
On October, 25th, 2022
Observed from Aspern, Vienna, Austria
The day right before national holiday in Austria, a partial eclipse of the sun was visible around noon. In Vienna the maximum coverage was calculated to be around 30 %, which was enough to expect an impressive performance. Just one day ahead of the show the odds for watching the event under a clear sky were not really good, but I decided to take a day off in order not to miss the event just in case the conditions were better than forecasted. And indeed they were! The turbulences in the atmosphere were moderate and one very sharp moment shortly before the maximum occultation allowed to obtain a high resolution shot from the sun partially covered by the moon.
The appearance of the sun itself was interesting but not spectacular. There have been weeks this year in which there was much more solar activity to see compared to this late October day, but the complexity specifically of the two marginally positioned sun spot groups, left and right, were worth the effort.
Mind not only the delicate detail in the sunspots when viewing the large scale picture, but also the bright faculae around the sunspot groups, which are particularly more prominent the closer they are towards the apparent border of the sun! These phenomena at the surface of the sun, sunspots and faculae, are mainly driven by strong magnetic fields which are subject to variation along an 11 year cylcle. There are years in which there are hardly any sun spots visible and years in which the surface of the sun is covered by lots of them.
The uneven shape of the moon is actually not associated with turbulences in our atmosphere, but the real horizon of the mountains and ranges at the edge of the earth's companion.
I used my standard instrument for solar photography, which is my 80 mm refractor equiped with a sun filter and a barlow lens operating at at 1280 mm focal length.
In total I took close to 150 pictures at 1 minutes intervals, from which I also generated a video (1.2 MB).
The file size is not overly extensive. Depending on your internet bandwidth, either click on the link or download and watch locally.