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SOLAR ECLIPSE 1999

Total Solar Eclipse 1999 in Bögöte Hungary.
As this total Eclipse was announced to happen 60 miles away from my home i tried to plan all activities for this event perfectly. So, the 2 years before the event i already started checking the weather conditions in the surrounding geography to find the right place depending on the actual weather conditions during eclipse time. Simple outcome was - if critical weather condition appears - going from my home south of Vienna in the southeast direction to Hungary ensures best weather. The reality showed on August 1999-08-11 exactly the same situation. In Austria i rained, so we crossed the Hungarian border near Szombathely and drove to the east approx 80 kilometers until there were NO CLOUDS AT ALL. We stopped in a little village called Bögöte.

I built up my equipment at 10:00 am. The plan was to make more than 47 pictures during total eclipse with 3 cameras with the help of my computer. To execute this i connected a selenoid board to the parallel port of the notebook. To the selenoids i connected the cable releases of 2 cameras to trigger with the software all images automatically. The Olympus OM1 was connected to the focus of the ETX90 where i did everything manually. The whole preparations were perfect and i could get during the 2 minutes and 12 seconds 47 sharp images with different focal length and different exposure times on 3 cameras.
 

Eclipse Images
 eclipse
ETX90 + OM1 Corona 		eclipse
ETX90 + OM1
Perl Ring starts		 eclipse
 ETX90 + OM1 Diamond Ring or "Banana"
eclipse
 ETX90 + OM1 Protuberances only 		eclipse
ETX90 + OM1 Protuberances plus inner Corona 		 

Overview about the equipment used:
A) Meade ETX90 1250mm focal length at F13.5 with Olympus OM1 and
     Kodachrome 64 ASA

B) Pentax Z1P Camera 400mm focal length and Kodachrome 25 ASA

C) Minolta 7000 Camera 800mm focal length and Kodak Ektachrome 100 ASA

D) IBM Notebook with Selenoidboard connected to the the parallel port and the
     remote cable control of the cameras
   
 
Eclipse 2001-06-21 Pictures from Lusaka in Zambia   (TOTAL)
 Eclipse 2003-05-31 Pictures from Mariazell in Austria (PARTIAL)
 Eclipse 2005-10-03 Pictures from Watamu in Kenya   (PARTIAL
 Eclipse 2006-03-29 Pictures from Antalya in Turkey   (TOTAL)
Eclipse 2009-07-22 Pictures from Jiashan/Shanghai in China    (TOTAL)