This was originally a usual blog post, but I think it’s more appropriate to be a permanent page, since maybe there won’t be a second chance for that picture down there to be taken anytime in my future… 😀
My wife called me this morning (2007/10/29), about 10.50 AM. I thought she wanted to remind me to pick her up and together go and pick up our son from school, but I was wrong.
“There’s a solar eclipse right now!!!! People here are all outside, watching the sky, using sun-glasses. People are taking pictures. Just go outside and see it for yourself.”
“What? A solar eclipse? It’s impossible, there’s no news about it, and it isn’t dark outside.”
I was near the entrance door of my office, I looked outside, everything seems OK, no sign of supposed-to-be dark solar eclipse situation. But, I step outside, and look up to the sky, there’s something strange allright, there’s some sort of rainbow near the sun. Curious, I step further outside, to the street in front of my office, look up, and while trying to block the sun with my hands, I see a big Halo, surrounding the sun.
No, it wasn’t a solar eclipse this morning that appeared to everyone in Makassar, but it was a Solar Halo. People aren’t familiar with this phenomenon and almost everyone refer to it as an eclipse, they thought that the big round thing was the moon, covering the sun.
Anyway, I took a great picture of it. I tried to take the picture near my house, but there are always electrical cords hanging all around and ruin my picture. So, after picking up my son, we decided to go to an area called Tanjung Bunga, which I know has no electrical cords hanging in the streets, specially along the Metro street. So, I stopped a while, open the car door a bit, and look straight up with my (new) camera.. and here’s the best picture i’ve got:
I took a total of 75 pictures of the halo, and this is the most round and full of the halo. Using ISO 100 and -1 Exposure, this image is still disturbed by my car door at the right-up corner and left-bottom corner. My eyes are still uncomfortable now, specially when I close it 😛
BTW, I also wanted to take pictures of people taking picture of the halo, but I only got one:
So, enjoy the halo as I and Makassar people did this morning 🙂