Today at 10:47am everything around our place went a little dark. The culprit was a partial eclipse of the sun – where the moon gets between the sun and the earth and we see the sun partially obscured. It was a little eerie as a beautiful sunny Wellington morning regressed to post dawn light and the temperature turned chilly.

To me it was the ideal opportunity to try solar photography. So my tripod, laptop and camera were set up in the front yard to capture the event.

Now we all know it’s not a good idea to look directly at the sun. Well it’s an even worse idea to look at the sun – even one partly obscured – through a camera eyepiece when a 300mm zoom lense is strapped on the front.

In fact, almost 6 hours later, I still seem to have a mysterious spot of intense white light obscuring part of my vision.

But, good news, I actually got a shot or two and after a wee bit of Photoshop correction it’s a fair representation of the event – nothing spectacular, but up close an eclipse is, fundamentally, just an eclipse.

Having said that, I probably could have simply generated the same thing in Photoshop and saved myself the temporary blindness.

For those who are into the detail, this shot was taken at ISO 100, f32, 1/8000 of  a second.