Partial solar eclipse at Vanuatu

A collection of the partial solar eclipse at Vanuatju captured with a camcorder.
The “show of the universe” was staged on many countries on July 22, 2009.
A few countries such as China were lucky enough to see total solar eclipse while some were able to see partial eclipse.

Source: NASA

The above image is from NASA.
The circle on the bottom right hand side indicates Vanuatu, where I live J. I was excited to see the eclipse, although it was partial.
Well, frankly put, I had to stand by for a good four hours because I didn’t know the exact timing of the event.
I did have some tough time because I had never observed the sun using a camcorder. It turns out that ordinary camcorders cannot effectively record the moment.
So after some deep thought, I invented a special filter and attached it to the front of the lens.

The images above were captured using a different camera.

The special film that I made uses two broken sunglass lenses attached to the camcorder using an adhesive tape.
My camcorder is Samsung HMX-H106. It is better than the Sony camcorder with embedded hardware that I used before this one.
Anyways… using this special(?) camcorder, I started recording the partial eclipse seen from Vanuatu.
I was all excited for this as it was the second time for me to watch the eclipse.

The sun seen through the sunglass looks similar to the moon.
This is the sun seen at Vanuatu before the eclipse.

This photo has too much reflection because I failed to adjust the exposure properly. It took me sometime to get familiar with the functions as I only recently started using the Samsung camcorder.


Finally, at 2:20 pm, eclipse started. My son and daughter, watching the eclipse for the first time in their life, were shouting with sheer excitement.


Eclipse progressed slower than I had expected.
And the clouds that filled up the sky made the photo taking quite challenging. But I stood by and was able to successfully finish the shooting!

The picture above is when the moon ate up the largest portion of the sun.



I practically ran around for an hour and a half trying to capture the spectacular scene.
But it was all the more rewarding!
If you want to watch the movie, rather than the still cut images, let me invite you to the following links.
If you find watching the whole thing boring, you can fast forward it.




So that was partial eclipse from South Pacific.
I wish everyone a happy and healthy life!