December is, from the point of weather, a very bad month in South Africa. The Slovak expedition organized by Vojtech Rušin had an enormous luck. They took 21 images in unstable and cloudy weather and only one image was significantly influenced by clouds. Images presented on this page were newly processed in 2004 and they differ from images presented on my Web pages in 2003. Three significant improvements were done. New phase correlation method of image alignment was applied. Edge reconstruction method enabled correct corona display up to the Moon's edge. Highly improved Corona software (version 3.0) was used for final processing.
 

 
During the processing of above presented images I obtained detailed images of the innermost corona taken by Friedhelm Dorst on another place in Africa.

Friedhelm Dorst was not lucky in choosing the observing place. Only a few hundred meters from his observing place he could have experienced a cloudless totality more or less just around the sun. The beginning of totality on his observing place was influenced by homogeneous but rather transparent clouds, the end suffered from only thin clouds. Several ones of the images taken with digital camera and rather long focal length (1315 mm) showed fine details but only in very narrow band around the Sun in the most inner part of corona. Fortunately the more distant parts were with good quality recorded on images presented above. That is why I tried to compose both series of images in order to achieve maximum possible image quality in large part of solar corona. The task was not easy because the images were taken from different positions to totality belt center line. Therefore the nearest neighborhood of the Moon's edge was possible to reconstruct only from one image set (taken by Friedhelm Dorst). Another problem was that only very narrow part of corona was correctly exposed on both sets of images and it made the calibration of images rather complicated. In the end I managed all problems successfully and the results can be seen on the following images.
 

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