Description
The University of Manchester Astronomy Society (AstroSoc) has been running for seven years. Established in 2017, it has been a platform for students to engage with astronomy and get hands on with the basics while having fun. As part of its activities, the society organised an observing session of the partial solar eclipse on Saturday 29 March 2025 in person with solar eclipse glasses, telescopes and binoculars, and via a livestream to its members.
The partial solar eclipse of 29 March 2025 could be viewed from the Schuster Building at The University of Manchester between 10:06 and 12:03 GMT, peaking at 11:04 GMT when the moon provided 30 – 40% coverage of the Sun.
To carry out this observation, a custom Baader planetarium solar filter film was fitted to a 6-inch Newtonian telescope on a tracking equatorial mount. To image the sun, an astronomy camera, ZWO ASI533MC Pro records at full resolution, 8 bit per channel with the video output connected to a Discord livestream.
Throughout this observing session, raw 8 bit clips were taken of different phases of the two-hour length partial eclipse. Next, the results were processed in Autostakkert!, then post processed in SIRIL and GIMP, forming the composite image. AstroSoc presents a composite image of 12 phases of the eclipse from that day, along with some supplementary images of the sunspots.
