I don’t know who comes up with these holidays, I really don’t – it’s makes little sense to celebrate something so banal. Why don’t we have National Spaghetti Day or Stay Away From Seattle Day while we’re at it?
[Oh. We do.]
But anyway, today/yesterday is/was Encounter Extraordinary/Rotten Luck Day, and since there are few, if any, holidays that I’ll let slip past me (because I’m a True Patriot™, and not one of these self-absorbed poseurs,) I am celebrating/celebrated it by chasing the total solar eclipse – which I realize that you might not have heard about here in the US, but there is/was a total solar eclipse today/yesterday across much of the country. I’d already driven north to be in the path, and so The Manatee and I are driving/drove off a bit further to get almost centered in the path for maximum exposure – or, you know, lack thereof. Whatever.
We’d been examining the cloud cover predictions something like twice a day to see what meteorologists said about it, but this is far from an exact science, only slightly better than economics, really, and so it is/was mostly down to luck. I am/was kinda psyched, because my luck with the barn-door tracker had been rather poor, and thus I was due for better luck with the eclipse itself, because that’s how luck and random events work – I have this on good authority from my gambler friends, who oughta know.
As you might recall, should you actually exist and should you have read anything else here, I have/had plans to try for two things on top of the eclipse itself: earthshine on the moon during the eclipse, and comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, which is/is presently in the sky rather close to the sun and predicted to become visible when the sun goes dark – both of these were what the barn-door tracker was intended to help with, since they would require longer exposures. Without that help, however, I am/was forced to resort to higher ISOs to keep the exposures brief.
So how did it all go?
Pretty terrible, really. Cloud cover was near-complete at the time of totality and I got nothing at all worth posting about, and would have nothing here if it weren’t for recognizing this stupid holiday. Not too shabby at all, I must say. The day started out raining, but quickly cleared to a cloudless sky that remained that way for the hour-long drive to be in peak path. Our first choice of a location turned out to be packed, even well over an hour ahead of the start of partial, but without much poking around we found a church [urk!] parking lot that was both empty and not blocked off, and set up shop. Meanwhile thin, high cirrus clouds had started rolling in, and we despaired about seeing the comet or even the planets when totality struck. However, it was an exceedingly pleasant and warm day for Ohio in April, and thus easy enough to hang around outside the car while we waited.
Now, the solar filter material that I had gotten well in advance turned out to be pretty wretched material, or it might have been the pieces of glass that I sandwiched it between to keep it in good shape and easy to handle, but the results during the partial phases were not the slightest bit impressive.
This was about 45 minutes before totality, but the resolution is pathetic. I maintained a few frames as things progressed, but really, there isn’t much to see here except the reduction of the visible sun disk – the sunspots that I’d hoped for had never developed.
As before, the reduction of light from the sun was weakly noticeable, but not half as much as one would expect – about like deep haze, except the contrast and sharp shadows were still plainly evident. The sun itself remained impossible to look at without filtration (eclipse glasses et al) right up until a second or three before totality. But like before, I did a couple of comparison shots.
The image on the right was taken on automatic, allowing the camera to set exposure, while the one on the left was taken using the “Sunny 16” rule for a proper exposure in bright sunlight. Obviously, it was much darker than “bright sunlight” out there, roughly two stops less or 1/4 as bright (which actually seems high to me, since this was about 15 minutes before totality.) The real darkness rolled in only moments before total, and once that struck, I was working without any filter.
I screwed up a little here, in that I was aiming for the ‘diamond ring’ effect of the last vestige of direct sunlight peeking past the lunar limb with the intact corona, but the exposure was too low for the corona. This effect is known as ‘Baily’s Beads,’ though, and shows the lunar terrain edge on, so you’re seeing light through the valleys and plains of the moon right along the edge. I’m not going to do it right now, but I’ll see if I can determine the actual terrain that the sun is peeking through later on. Meanwhile, if you look very closely towards the left of the effect, you’ll see the faintest vestige of a solar prominence, which you’ll see better, well, right now.
Because of the faintly obscuring clouds, I hadn’t bothered to set a ‘proper’ exposure for the corona, so this is less than I’d aimed, but the pinkish solar prominences are easily visible, and if you look closely below the one on the left, you’ll see another faint, wispy one extending off into space. Of course, this is all relative, since that’s probably several times longer than the Earth is wide.
But moments later I exposed more for the corona.
Once again, this was plainly visible without aid, and even the tiniest pink spots of the prominences could be seen by naked eye, but the sun is actually quite small in the sky so of course the long lens helped a lot. The clouds obscured less than expected and Venus and Jupiter were immediately visible at totality, even with the clouds visible in the sky, but I didn’t even bother with looking for the comet. My attempts at capturing the eclipse, Jupiter, and Venus lined up in the sky with a second camera came to naught; I literally just fired off a few frames on autoexposure between the various other images that I was trying to capture, but you know, handheld images of ‘stars’ never turn out well.
I did, however, make several different exposures in the attempt to bring up earthshine, but on initial examinations, no details were showing up before the glare from the corona overloaded the frame. At some point later on, I’ll bring them into GIMP and play with the light levels, see if anything at all was captured, but I suspect the difference between the brightness of the corona and the dimness of the earthshine is just too great.
Annnnddd I did successfully capture a ‘diamond ring’ at the end of totality – not quite what I was hoping to get, but it suffices.
I had alarms set and was ready for re-emergence, but they weren’t down to the second, so I just fired off a sequence of frames as it began – they very soon descended into pure glare. Exposure was still set for the corona, so this was 1/60 second at f6.3, ISO 200; I probably should have had a much smaller aperture to try and produce a starburst, which would have either slowed the shutter speed awfully far, or pushed the ISO much higher to compensate – tricky to get correct, and the conditions existed for a mere second, so no opportunity for experiments. Maybe next time around.
[Unless I get a whole lot of money to travel, the next one for North America will be in 2044, and it’s unlikely this old fart will be attempting to capture that one. So, you know, donations are welcome…]
Later on I’ll bring up the brief video that I captured, scanning the entire surrounding horizon because the ‘sunset’ glow in 360° was indeed visible, the benefit of being out in open farm country. But this post has taken a long time to put together, especially since I’m still visiting with friends and cannot devote a lot of time to it, so I’ll close with a pair of images taken by my companion out there, The Manatee – I was unaware that he was doing so, otherwise I would have looked even more dashing, if you can imagine that.
This was during the partial phase probably not too long before totality, taken with a [bleagh] smutphone, and I don’t have a timestamp and so cannot tell you how far along the eclipse was – maybe it’ll be edited in later.
And this was during totality, when the surroundings were all ‘twilight’ and dim, but bright enough to see what you were doing. If you look closely at the side of the car by the taillight, you can see the reflection of the surrounding orange glow from the horizon, and if you look at the bottom edge of the widow on the back door, you’ll see the reflection of the eclipse itself – not detailed, but that’s the bright spot.
But at least I tried I got a few decent images out of it, and got some gaming and entertainment out of it as well. I’m cool.
Note to self: Delete inappropriate options before posting. Don’t forget this time, you putz.]