I was at Baby Lagoon Beach in Aruba, on 26 February 1998, to experience a wonderful total solar eclipse. There are no words that could truly describe the event. The sun was replaced with a hole in the sky that was extremely black with a beautiful pearly white corona that looked like a ring of white fire around it. I could understand why people who don't understand what an eclipse is would be afraid of it.
I photographed it with one of my Olympus OM-3 bodies attached to a Meade 2045 4" Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope. The telescope is equivalent to a 1000mm f/10 lens. There are a few advantages to using a telescope over a traditional camera lens. A telescope that uses a mirror has no chromatic aberration which would otherwise create a color fringe around the edge of the silhouetted moon. Also, this telescope has a motorized equatorial mount that allowed me to track the sun for hours without having to constantly check the pointing of the camera. I used Fuji Provia 100 film and this photograph was exposed for 1/125 of a second.
I scanned the image with a Nikon Coolscan LS-10 and Adobe Photoshop. Photograph by Rick Scott.
Updated: 25 May 1998