Happy New Year to All!
I've just gotten back from an extended vacation and subscribed to the new list, so I haven't seen any new messages yet. Was anyone able to get some good shots of the Christmas eclipse? I attempted about a dozen, some of which came out. I was using a 400mm f/5 refracting telescope, 2X teleconverter (as well as eyepiece projection on a few shots), and full-aperture solar filter consisting of two layers of aluminized Mylar (estimated ND 5). Unfortunately, the film I had in my camera was 800-speed print film (leftover from some experiments earlier in the month with tripod-mounted astrophotos), and my shortest shutter speed of 1/2000 was still a little too long (perhaps by one or two stops) for the full intensity of the uneclipsed solar disk. The processing machine at my neighborhood pharmacy was unable to sense the edges of each frame, and the "trained technician" wasn't sure if it was even possible to manually select the frame edges, so printing was a bit hit-or-miss. Shame on me for not using a real lab. Nonetheless, I was able to get a few reasonable prints in which some rather washed out sunspot groups are visible. I'll run these through the flatbed scanner and see if I can improve things with some image processing. If I have any luck extracting some decent images, I'll post them to my website for those who are interested.
Take care,
Bill Peifer
Rochester, NY
