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Wolfgang Strickling's eclipse page 2003

On 2003-05-31 an annular eclipse was highly partial observable in Germany, with its first contact long before sunrise and maximum eclipsed sun rising above the horizon. Of high interest was to record the progress of dawn, which was affected by the eclipse even before sunrise. I made dawn brightness measurements in Haltern am See, Germany (51.75° N, 7.18° E) and in Stuhr (53.02° N, 8.78° E) near Bremen, Germany. Times are MESZ (Middle European Summertime Zone, = UT +2h)

sunrise of partial eclipsed sun in Stuhr near Bremen, Germany:
left: telelens 1:8/500

right and bottom:
1:10/1000 Maksutov-telelens+ 2 x converter on Fujichrome Velvia .

upper right: 05:16 MESZ,

lower right: 05:18 MESZ,

below maximum eclipse,
beginning cloudiness and last contact

The progress of dawn during the eclipse

The brightness sensor was the chip TSL 230 by Texas instruments. Precision of measurement set was +- 20%.

For temperature measurement I used in Stuhr the Thermosensor DS 1621, mounted on a 4 m high mast (picture on the right). In Haltern am See the sensor was the analog KTY 87-105 on a building's roof.

Results:

All measurement I made are available as a ZIP file.

Abb. 2: Graph of sky brightness in Haltern am See.

The solid yellow graph shows the brightness on eclipse day, the dashed line the brightness on 05-29, two days before. The fine red line is the quotient of both values (05-31 / 05-29). from 06:20 MESZ clouds diminished the brightness around 60% normal brightness.

Abb. 3: brightness in Stuhr near Bremen/Germany.

The solid yellow graph shows the brightness on eclipse day in Stuhr, the dashed line the brightness on 05-29, two days before from Haltern am See for comparison. The red line shows the temperature. Here also clouds affected brightness after 05:30 MESZ.

Vertical lines mark first contact, sunrise, maximum eclipse and sunset.

Maximum in Stuhr/Germany was at 5:31 MESZ; 1st contact at 4:36, and 4th contact at 6:30 MESZ.

back to my German Homepage
table sofi2003mess.zip, ZIP compressed (decompressed: CSV-files)
My eclipse projects
My eclipse observations 1999, 2001, 2005 (in German, DE), 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011 (DE), 2012 (DE), 2015 (DE), 2016, 2017

last update was on 2017-09-13
URL is http://www.strickling.net/sofi2003_eng.htm