Annular Solar Eclipse - Wayanad - Kalpetta -2019 December 26

The picture of the maximum of the annular eclipse on 26th December 2019 is taken from Kalpetta – Myladippara in Wayanad (11°37'28.6"N 76°05'34.3"E) using a 14mm f2.8 Samyang lens on a Canon full frame.

A view around 09:30am when the eclipse was at the peak, the ring is visible in this picture

Thanks to Rehal Bensy Paul for the suggestion of this wonderful location, he was kind enough to get up at 04:30 in the morning and to take me to this location by 05:00 am in his scooter. Thanks for his wonderful support throughout and for staying with me till the end of the planned time-lapse shoot (till 11:00 am). The location was astonishing and promising. I was excited to shoot the holy grail of time lapse with the stars early in the morning and fog getting cleared as the sun rises and then the actual eclipse, see the second picture posted here with the stars appearing before the dawn. We waited patiently and ramped down the exposure (a 20 sec exposure at f2.8 and 800 ISO in the beginning to 1/200 shutter speed, f11 and ISO 100-400) carefully without tripping the tripod or moving the camera as the light changed from starry night to the light of sunrise in the dawn.

Before dawn, the fog was well below our location lurking above and lighted up from the city lights of Kalpetta. Chembra peak (2100 meter from sea level) and mountains can be seen in the distance towards the right side of the horizon in this picture.

Initially everything progressed as we planned but the heavy rain that poured almost half an hour on the previous evening (Christmas day) caused heavy fog to cover the sky soon after sunrise and spoiled the entire plan. In fact most of the locations in Wayanad couldn’t witness the eclipse. Occasionally the sun cleared a bit and gave a glimpse of the partially eclipsed view through the heavy fog and was easy enough to look at without a solar filter film. But during the totality the sun was completely covered up by the foggy sky. I thought I wasted a lot of clicks and shutter actuations (around 2500 clicks from 05:00 am till11:00 am), after reaching back Ireland, I gave a rough try to process the RAW images into JPEG for a quick time-lapse, I found around 8 clicks during the totality that actually captured the eclipsed solar ring, the ring was more prominent when I adjusted the color curves, levels and other sliders a little bit, and the above picture is the final result. 

Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse that happened on 15th Jan 2010 was an annular eclipse. Scientists calculated that this is the longest annular eclipse of the millennium. The eclipse could be seen in its completeness from Dhanushkodi, the nearest place to Srilanka in India. It was a working day for me, and I went out to see if I can photograph the event. Since, the eclipse was partial in Bangalore; the sun was still brighter so that my camera could not get the actual shape of the eclipsed sun. It only gave the impression of a very bright ball in the picture. I tried with the minimum aperture and maximum shutter speed in my camera (Canon Powershot S2 IS). Still I could not get the actual view. Lot of people assembled there to watch the event. One guy came with an x ray film and helped me to photograph the event. Yes, it worked. I placed the X-Ray film on top of the lens, and adjusted the aperture and shutter speed. After two or three trials, I could compute the required values for aperture and shutter speed, and got these images. Dhanushkodi is an interesting place to visit, a big tragedy happened there long before. You can read about this place in Wikipedia in the link (Dahnushkodi)

More info about this solar eclipse can be found in Wikipedia in the following link. Solar Eclipse - 15th Jan 2010