U.S. Solar Eclipses - Oct. 14, 2023 (Annular) & Apr. 08, 2024 (Total)

[jtbell]

The thin clouds at our location didn’t prevent a good show at totality. The ring of the inner corona was clearly visible against a translucent blue-gray background.

I attempted some hand-held shots with my Nikon D7000 similar to the one I posted of the 2017 eclipse, using various exposures. I’ll see what I can do with them in Photoshop after I get home in a couple of days.

As we drove back to our hotel about an hour away, over local roads, we passed over the Ohio Turnpike (route I-80). The eastbound lanes were packed with cars heading towards Pennsylvania and presumably other points further east.

 

[rbelli1]

The thin clouds at our location didn’t prevent a good show at totality.

The clouds did obscure totality at my location considerably. But this was my first totality so it was totally awesome anyway.

BoB

 

[jtbell]

We also had a parallel "thriller" sub-plot for this trip.

During the second day of our two-day drive from South Carolina, my 11-year-old Chevy's "check engine" light came on. We stopped at a Chevy dealer in the next town. The guy who could run the diagnostics wasn't there that day, but the guy running the service desk said so long as the light stayed steady instead of flashing, and we didn't notice any changes in the engine's running, we could probably continue safely.

Of course we couldn't do anything about it over the weekend after we arrived. This morning we called a local Chevy dealer, and the shop was able to work us in at 10:30. It turned out we had a cracked air intake duct. They were able to get a replacement quickly and install it. We arrived at our eclipse-viewing site, a half hour away, about 1:00.

I suppose if it had taken longer to get the replacement part, they could have slapped on some duct tape, we could have gone on to watch the eclipse, and then come back the next day for the permanent fix, delaying our return home by a day. But now we're all set.

 

[jtbell]

A few minutes from totality, the automatic streetlights came on:

 

[jtbell]

Hot off the press, so to speak:

View attachment 343015

As I was shooting pictures with my Nikon SLR, I generally used a normal or wide angle setting so as to include nearby trees and buildings. Towards the end I went to a moderate telephoto setting (about 100mm) and noticed a red spot at the bottom of the coronal ring. Uh-oh, I thought, the end of the eclipse is upon us, and stopped shooting. The following first flash of sunlight was much brighter.

When I saw Andy's picture I realized that I must have seen a solar flare prominence. I wonder if it showed up in my last picture.... hmmm, enlarging it in the camera's LCD screen... not enough detail to show the flare itself, but the coronal circle does look a bit reddish there.

 

[Vanadium 50]

There was (well, probably stiill is) a fairly large red/pink prominence near the bottom of the sun.

The weather girl that one channel had doing the announcement said it was helium, but to me it looked a lot like a hydrogen gas discharge tube.

 

[nsaspook]

https://blog.cloudflare.com/total-eclipse-internet-traffic-impacts-mexico-us-canada
Total eclipse of the Internet: traffic impacts in Mexico, the US, and Canada

 

[jtbell]

Belatedlly, here's probably the best one of my photos of the eclipse from my Nikon DSLR. First, the original JPEG, unaltered except for cropping. Second, a version tweaked from the RAW file.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

I had this in my files to post (regarding a sungrazing comet - see ahead) - goes back to eclipse time - really interesting, take a look
(posted on spaceweather.com on April 10 & 11, 2024) :

" THIS COMET DID NOT SURVIVE THE ECLIPSE: Astronomer Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab predicted that a sungrazing comet might be visible during Monday's total eclipse. He was right. Chinese amateur astronomer Lin Zixuan was in New Hampshire for the eclipse, and he photographed the disintegrating comet:

Named "SOHO-5008", the comet had been discovered earlier the same day by amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod, who noticed it in SOHO coronagraph images. Battams quickly realized that the comet might be bright enough to photograph in the otherworldly twilight of the Moon's shadow.

"Ground-based observations of sungrazing comets are extremely rare, so this would be a great opportunity to see an eclipse comet!" says Battams.

Soon after Zixuan photographed the comet, it disintegrated. SOHO has seen this happen more than 5000 times. Most doomed sungrazers (including this one) are members of the Kreutz family. Named after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them in detail, Kreutz sungrazers are fragments from the breakup of a giant comet ~2000 years ago. Several fragments pass by the sun and disintegrate every day, although most are too small to see.

A SOHO coronagraph image of the disintegrating comet​

Battams can recall only two other examples of sungrazers seen during a solar eclipse--one in 2020 (also a Worachate Boonplod discovery) and another in 2008. " I think with modern imaging equipment and techniques, seeing a sungrazer during an eclipse is no longer hugely challenging, but it does require one crucial ingredient: the right comet at the right time. We got lucky this week!" he says. "