Eye in the Sky - Eclipse 99 Revisited

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Composite of a LASCO C2 image and a ground-based white light image, taken during the eclipse on 11 August 1999.

Caption: Remember the eclipse of 1999? As the last total eclipse of the millennium, it received a lot of attention at the time. The above composite has been generated from two images taken during the eclipse - one taken by the LASCO instrument on board SOHO, and one taken in Iran by a team from Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris - CNRS.

The images have been carefully processed and aligned to show the astonishing degree of correlation between features in the two images. Although the images are separated in time by 5 minutes, we cannot expect a shift of more than 1 arc second from the solar rotation (assuming rigid rotation). This corresponds to 1/10 of a pixel in the LASCO C2 images, so the correlation should be close to perfect (as can be seen).

Eclipse links:

• ESA Solar System Division Eclipse 99
• NASA Eclipse 99 Info
• IAU Working Group on Solar Eclipses
• BBC's Eclipse 1999

Picture Credit: SOHO/LASCO (ESA & NASA) and IAP-CNRS.
Image processing/coments: Serge Koutchmy (koutchmy@iap.fr), Daniel Oropeza, Thomas Sanchez.
Instrument/observatories: LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph); Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (IAP-CNRS).
Taken: 11 August 1999, 12:03 UT (Iran) and 12:08 UT (LASCO)