Hey! Who turned out the lights?
I’m writing this from Missouri, where I’ve dragged my wife to come see the eclipse from the home base of my sister. The opening picture is the sun taken by my camera just before totality. We had clearing skies, but for the totality, it was high, thin clouds over the sun. Our viewing spot was in Marshall, Missouri, where we paid for parking at a school for troubled youths. They had handicapped parking and indoor restrooms, so we did better than some of her friends who are going to fields or in one case a scrap yard to watch the eclipse. The skies cleared and we had beautiful blue to watch the moon proceed eastward. I hope those from Colorado who headed north to Wyoming and Nebraska did even better.
I’d love to invite people to post comments about your experience today, as well as leading up to today. I also welcome comments on previous memorable ecllipses (eclilpsi?) you’ve seen — solar and/or lunar.
For example, I’ve seen one total solar eclipse before this one — in 1979, my sister and I, both high school students, took a bus with other astronomy fans we were familiar with up to Brandon, Manitoba in Canada in February to stand freezing our tails off in an open field to watch a total eclipse through high clouds. I don’t have any pictures from that, but nearly forty years later I can still remember the angry red rim to the sun around the moon and the beautiful diamond ring effect as the moon finally slid off the face of the sun at the end of totality. I’m aiming to get plenty of good pictures this eclipse; I have good equipment as you can see from the photos in this diary.
I’ve seen several total lunar eclipses — those aren’t nearly so rare as a total solar eclipse, but one in particular produced my favorite photo of my favorite four-footed friend, my Basset hound named Fred.
Fred couldn’t care less about the lunar eclipse happening in the skies above him.Fred refused to budge in his old age as the moon was turned red and then devoured by a shadow in the skies above. He was fast asleep at 2AM in front of the hearth, perhaps with visions of sugarplums dancing in his head. This image is what I have on his box of ashes, waiting for such time as our ashes are mingled in the stardust of this rocky planet, to be turned into some other firmament and absorbed into the nova of the red giant that the Sun is projected to become at some point several billion years from now. At which point, eclipses won’t be happening anymore, of any sort.
The high clouds are why this is so hazy, but you can still see the flares on the sides. False dusk, looking to the East False dusk, looking to the west Diamond ring effect coming out of total eclipse. Some people said they saw it on the opposite side as it slid into eclipse, but I missed that while changing from the filter to the raw lens. I thought there was an error right at the point of the moon, where it seemed like a tall mountain was in silhouette. Later I realized that it was actually the leading edge of a sunspot seen behind the moon. Towards the end, showing the line of sunspots. Using a colander to see a world of eclipses Our group of star (sun) gazersChat away...
BTW, I’m happy to share the full-size photos with Kossacks. Kosmail me.