For reasons unknown, I never went looking for these after returning from the trip, but I also never had any such images pop up anywhere in my usual haunts, so I suspected that no one got anything worth keeping. Until now, that is.
Astronomy Picture of the Day features someone who actually got comet 12P/Pons-Brooks during the total solar eclipse, something that I’d intended to try for but was defeated by the failure of the barn-door tracker and the cirrus clouds across the sky. Lin Zixuan, however, was not.
In fact, Lin Zixuan caught two comets in a long exposure – one of which was unknown to everyone until just a few hours before the eclipse, when it was captured in a coronograph (photographs aimed to image only the sun’s corona) by Worachate Boonplod. As always. clicking on the image will take you to the Astronomy Picture of the Day page, and clicking on it there will open up the full resolution image with much better detail. And it shows that Lin Zixuan actually got more than a hint of earthshine on the moon, the rat bastard (said entirely out of envy and frustration.) Both Lin Zixuan and Worachate Boonplod are amateur astronomers, which demonstrates that it’s not only the professionals with the expensive and elaborate equipment that can make discoveries or capture the cool stuff.
Moreover, SOHO-5008 was what’s called a sungrazer, a comet that approaches extremely close to the sun, and yes, I said, “was,” because it vanished only hours afterward, likely torn apart by the sun’s gravity. This means that there was only a narrow window to even know that it existed, and it was captured by at least two amateur astronomers in that time.
Now, we depart the “Too cool” classification for a shameless springboard, but I’d uploaded this last night before the APOD even posted and intended to do a follow-up post anyway, so I’m cramming them together, like someone putting broccoli in with your mandarin chicken. I think I’d mentioned that I had a video clip, and here it is, for what it’s worth (and that’s not much.) Almost forgetting about it during the eclipse, I suddenly realized that the sunset colors were indeed visible all around the horizon, and quickly grabbed the camcorder out of the car and slammed the battery into it, then had to blast through the setup menu because the internal battery had died and the camera wanted me to set the correct date and time (which I did not do – I just approved January 1, 2009 at 12:01 AM I think.) C’mon, the entire eclipse lasted not quite four minutes and we were already well into it.
But watch for Venus to pop up briefly to the lower right of the eclipse as the camera tracks up to it, to disappear entirely as the autofocus went spastic in confusion. Jupiter was also plainly visible in the sky, both immediately visible the moment totality closed in, but again, because of the clouds (which are somewhat visible in the video,) I did not pursue any deep sky shots.
What you’re seeing here is the sunlight outside of the zone of totality, the shadow cast by the moon, which is a little less than 200 kilometers wide, so that light on the horizon was a bit less than 100 kilometers away where the sun was still shining. Just after totality ended but the sun was still largely blocked to us, I looked all around at the sky overhead and, while no “shadow” was distinctly visible on the cloud cover, moving away, there was a definite difference in brightness from the sky in the shape of a huge parabolic arc, perhaps only visible because of those cirrus clouds. A time-lapse series taken of the sky as totality came and went might have been cool, but it never occurred to me to try it. Someone else might’ve, though.
As noted earlier, the birds got quieter when totality closed in, but did not go completely silent – we were definitely hearing some of them singing. My recollection was that they went silent just as the eclipse ended and the sun broke out again, but the video seems to indicate otherwise.
As an amusing aside, The Manatee was standing right alongside the car and would have appeared in the video, but he saw me panning around and ducked below the camera as it passed – that’s him commenting that it was getting brighter. Not long after that, my watch alarm went off telling us that totality was soon to end, and I got ready for the diamond ring frames.