2024 – The Amazing Sky

December 21, 2024December 22, 2024

2024 — The Greatest Year of Stargazing ?

2024 brought us a total eclipse of the Sun, superb auroras, and a naked-eye comet, three top highlights of a wonderful year of celestial attractions. Maybe the best!

In our book The Backyard Astronomer’s Guide (which we revised this year), Terence Dickinson and I created an Aah! Factor scale with various celestial sights ranked from:

• 1, evoking just a smile, to …

• 10, a life-changing event!

Our book’s Aah! Factor Scale in Chapter 1

Coming in at an 8 is a naked-eye comet. Deserving a 9 is an all-sky display of an aurora. The only sight to rate a top 10 is a total eclipse of the Sun.

2024 brought all three, and more!

Here’s my look back at what I think was one of the greatest years of stargazing.

NOTE: The images might take a while to all load. All can be enlarged to full screen. Just click or tap on them.

January

A Winter Moonrise to Begin the Year

Now, this was not any form of rare event. But seeing and shooting any sky sight in the middle of a Canadian winter is an accomplishment. This is the rising of the Full Moon of January, popularly called the Wolf Moon, over a frozen lake near home in Alberta, Canada 🇨🇦.

It serves to bookend the collection with a Full Moon I captured eleven months later in December.

February

Auroras from Churchill, Manitoba

Had this been my only chance to see the Northern Lights fill the sky this year, I would have been happy. As we often see in Churchill, the aurora covered the sky on several nights, a common sight when you are underneath the main band of aurora borealis that arcs across the northern part of the globe.

This is a vertical panorama of the sky-filling aurora of February 10, 2024, as seen from the Churchill Northern Studies Centre, in Churchill, Manitoba.

I attended to two aurora tour groups at the Churchill Northern Studies Centre who both got good displays to check “seeing the Northern Lights” off their bucket list. Join me in 2025!

March

Under the Austral Sky

Ranking a respectable 7 on our Aah! Factor scale is the naked-eye sight of the galactic centre overhead, with the Milky Way arcing across the sky. That’s possible from a latitude of about 30° South. That’s where I went in March, back to Australia 🇦🇺 for the first time since 2017.

This is a framing of the most spectacular area of the southern Milky Way, from Centaurus at left, to Carina at right, with Crux, the Southern Cross, at centre.

I wrote about it in my previous blog, where I present a tour along the southern Milky Way, and wide-angle views of the Milky Way (the images here are framings of choice regions).

This frames the southern Milky Way from Canis Major and its bright star Sirius at top, to Carina and its bright star Canopus at bottom, the two brightest stars in the night sky. The large red complex is the Gum Nebula.

It is a magical latitude that all northern astronomers should make a pilgrimage to, if only to just lie back and enjoy the view of our place in the outskirts of the Galaxy. I was glad to be back Down Under, to check this top sky sight off my bucket list for 2024.

April

A Total Eclipse of the Sun

No sooner had I returned home from Oz, when it was time to load up the car with telescope gear and drive to the path of the April 8 total solar eclipse, the first “TSE” in North America since 2017, which was the last total eclipse I had seen, in a trip to Idaho.

This is a composite of telescopic close-ups of the April 8, 2024 total eclipse, with a multi-exposure blend for the corona at centre, flanked by the diamond rings.

But where? I started south to Texas, my Plan A. Poor weather forecasts there prompted a hasty return to Canada, to drive east across the country to … I ended up in Québec. My blog about my cross-continental chase is here. My final edited music video is linked to below.

It was gratifying to see a total eclipse from “home” in Canada, only the third time I’ve been able to do that (previously in 1979 – Manitoba, and 2008 – Nunavut). If the rest of the year had been cloudy except for this day I wouldn’t have complained. Much.

This definitely earned a 10 on the Aah! Factor scale. Total eclipses are overwhelming and addictive. I’ve made my bookings for 2026 in Spain 🇪🇸 and 2027 in Tunisia 🇹🇳.

May

The Sky’s On Fire

It had been several years since I had seen an aurora from my backyard with colours as vivid and obvious as they were this night. But on May 10, the sky erupted with a fabulous display of aurora that much of the world saw, as aurora borealis in the north and aurora australis in the south.

This is a 300º panorama of the May 10, 2024 Northern Lights display, when the Kp Index reached 8 (out of 9), bringing aurora to the southern U.S.

This was the first of several all-sky shows this year. I blogged about the year’s great auroras here, where there are links to the movies I produced that capture the Northern Lights as only movies can, recording changes so rapid it can be hard to take it all in. Check off a 9 here!

So not even half way through the year, I had seen three of the top sky sights: the Milky Way core overhead (7), an all-sky aurora (9), and a total eclipse of the Sun (10).

But there was more to come! Including an Aah! Factor 8.

June

World Heritage Nightscape Treks

This is a panorama of the arch of the Milky Way rising over the Badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, with a sky tinted with twilight and airglow.

The sky took a break from presenting spectacles, allowing me to head off on short local trips, to favourite nightscape sites in southern Alberta, which we have in abundance. The Badlands of Dinosaur Provincial Park are just an hour away, the site for the scene above.

A panorama at sunset at Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park (Áísínai’pi) in Alberta, with the Milk River below and the Sweetgrass Hills in the distance in Montana. Note the people at far right.

The rock formations of Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park are a bit farther, requiring a couple of days commitment to shoot. Clouds hid the main attraction, the Milky Way, this night, but did provide a fine sunset.

The Milky Way rises over Mt. Blakiston, in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta. This was June 10, 2024, so snow remains at high altitudes.

A little further west down the highway is Waterton Lakes National Park, another great spot I try to visit at least once each year.

All locations I hit this month are U.N. World Heritage Sites, thus the theme of my blog from June. People travel from all over the world to come here, to sites I can visit in a few hours drive.

July

Mountains by Starlight

In summer we now often contend with smoke from forest fires blanketing the sky, hiding not just the stars by night, but even the Sun by day.

The Andromeda Galaxy at centre is rising above Takakkaw Falls, in Yoho National Park. Above is the W of stars marking Cassiopeia.

But before the smoke rolled in this past summer I was able to visit a spot, Yoho National Park in British Columbia, that had been on my shot list for several years. The timing with clear nights at the right season and Moon phase has to work out. In July it did, for a shoot by starlight at Takakkaw Falls, among the tallest in Canada.

This is the Milky Way core and a bonus meteor over the peaks and valleys at Saskatchewan River Crossing, in Banff National Park, Alberta.

The following nights I was in Banff National Park, at familiar spots on the tourist trail, but uncrowded and quiet at night. It was a pleasure to enjoy the world-class Rocky Mountain scenery under the stars on perfect nights.

August

The All-Sky Auroras Return

In August I headed east to Saskatchewan and the annual Summer Star Party staged by the astronomy clubs in Regina and Saskatoon. It is always a pleasure to attend the SSSP in the beautiful Cypress Hills. The sky remained clear post-party for a trip farther east to the little town of Val Marie, where I stayed at a former convent, and had a night to remember out in Grasslands National Park, one of Canada’s first, and finest, dark sky preserves.

The Northern Lights in a superb all-sky Kp6 to 7 display on August 11-12, 2024, in Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan.

The plan was to shoot the August 11 Perseid meteor shower, but the aurora let loose again for a stunning show over 70 Mile Butte. My earlier blog has more images and movies from this wonderful month of summertime Northern Lights.

We are fortunate in western Canada 🇨🇦 to be able to see auroras year-round, even in summer. Farther north at the usual Northern Lights destinations, the sky is too bright at night in summer.

September

Back to Deep Sky Wonders …

This is a framing of the rich starfield in Sagittarius and Serpens containing a mix of bright star clouds, glowing nebulas, and dark dust in the Milky Way.

September is the month for another astronomical party in the Cypress Hills, but on the Alberta side. At the wonderful Southern Alberta Star Party under its very dark skies, I was able to shoot some favourite deep-sky fields along the Milky Way with new gear I was testing at the time.

This frames the complex region of emission nebulas in central Cygnus near the star Gamma Cygni, at lower left. The Crescent Nebula is at centre.

And from home, September brought skies dark and clear enough (at least when there was no aurora!) for more captures of colourful nebulas (above and below) along the summer Milky Way.

This frames all the photogenic components of the bright Veil Nebula in Cygnus, a several-thousand-year-old supernova remnant.

We invest a lot of money into the kind of specialized gear needed to shoot these targets (and I’m not nearly as “committed” as some are, believe me!), only to find the nights when it all comes together can be few and far between.

… Plus, A Very Minor Eclipse of the Moon

I had to include this, if only for stark contrast with the spectacular solar eclipse six months earlier.

We had an example of the most minor of lunar eclipses on March 24, 2024, with a so-called “penumbral” eclipse of the Moon, an eclipse so slight it’s hard to tell anything unusual is happening. (So I’ve not even included an image here, though I was able to shoot it.)

Me at another successful eclipse chase … to my backyard to capture the partial lunar eclipse on September 17, 2024. The Moon is rising in the southeast.

On September 17, we had our second eclipse of the Moon in 2024. This time the Earth’s umbral shadow managed to take a tiny bite out of the Full Moon. Nothing spectacular to be sure. But at least this eclipse expedition was to no farther away than my rural backyard. A clear eclipse of any kind, even a partial eclipse, especially one seen from home, is reason to celebrate. I did!

Of course, a total eclipse of the Moon, when the Full Moon is completely engulfed in Earth’s umbra and turns red, is what we really want to see. They rate a 7 on our Aah! Factor scale. We haven’t had a “TLE” since November 8, 2022, blogged about here.

The next is March 14, 2025. (The link takes you to Fred Espenak’s authoritative web page.)

October

A Bright Comet At Last!

We knew early in 2024 that the then newly-discovered Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS had the potential to perform this month. I planned a trip south to favourite spots in Utah and Arizona to take advantage of what we hoped would be a fine autumn comet.

This is Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) at its finest in the evening sky, on October 14, two days after its closest approach to Earth, and with it sporting a 10º- to 15º-long dust tail, and a short narrow anti-tail pointed toward the horizon. The location was Turret Arch in the Windows area of Arches National Park, Utah.

It blossomed nicely, especially as it entered into the evening sky in mid-October, as above. Despite the bright moonlight, it was easy to see with the unaided eye, a celestial rarity we get only once a decade, on average, if we are lucky. My blog of my comet chase is here.

This is a panorama of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over Arches National Park, Utah, on a moonlit night, October 15, 2024, with the comet easy to see with the unaided eye.

A naked-eye comet ranks an 8 on our Aah! Factor scale. So now 2024 had delivered all four of our Top 4 sky sights.

This 360° panorama captures a rare SAR (Stable Auroral Red) arc across the Arizona sky in the pre-dawn hours of October 11, 2024. The SAR arc was generated in the high atmosphere as part of the global geomagnetic storm of October 10/11, 2024, with a Kp8 rating that night.

But … just as a bonus, there was another fabulous aurora on October 10, seen in my case from the unique perspective of southern Arizona, with an appearance of a bright “SAR” arc more prominent than I had ever seen before. So that view was a rarity, too, so unusual it doesn’t even make our Aah! list, as SARs are typically not visible to the eye.

November

Back to Norway for Northern Lights

2024 was notable for travel getting “back to normal,” at least for me, with two long-distance drives, and now my second overseas trip. This one took me north to Norway 🇳🇴, which I had been visiting twice a year as an enrichment lecturer during pre-pandemic years.

A green and red aurora appears over the coast of Norway, with Jupiter bright at right. This was from the Hurtigruten ship m/s *Nordkapp* on November 10, 2024, on a coastal cruise with a Road Scholar tour group.

The auroras were excellent, though nothing like the great shows of May and October. But the location sailing along the scenic coast and fjords makes up for any shortfall in the Lights. It was good to be back. I plan to return in 2025 for two cruises in October. Join me there, too!

December

A Winter Moonrise to End the Year

As I write this, December has been nothing but cloud. Almost. A clear hour on Full Moon night allowed a capture of the “Cold Moon,” with the Moon near Jupiter, then at its brightest for the year. So that’s the other lunar bookend to the year, shot from the snowy backyard.

This is the Full Moon of December 14, 2024, near the planet Jupiter at lower right. Both were rising into the eastern sky in the early evening.

However, I did say after the clear total eclipse in April that if the rest of 2024 had been cloudy I wouldn’t complain. So I’m not.

And there’s no reason to, as 2024 did deliver the best year of stargazing I can remember. 2017 had a total solar eclipse. 2020 had a great comet. But we have to go back to 2003 for aurora shows as widespread and as a brilliant as we’ve seen this year. 2024 had them all. And more!

We might see more auroras in 2025. And we have a total eclipse of the Moon. Two in fact, if you’re willing to travel to the other hemisphere.

My 2025 Calendar cover. Go to https://www.amazingsky.com/Books

My 2025 Amazing Sky Calendar lists my picks for the best sky events of the coming year, with the emphasis on events viewable from North America. For a free PDF download of my Calendar, go to my website here.

Clear skies to all, in a Happy New Year!

— Alan, December 21, 2024 / amazingsky.com

May 18, 2024May 18, 2024

The Great Aurora Show of May 10, 2024

It has been many years since we were treated to an aurora as widely seen as the show on May 10, 2024. Here’s my tale of the great display.

As the sky darkened around the world on May 10/11, 2024, sky watchers in both the northern and southern hemispheres were amazed to see the sky lit by the deep reds, greens and pinks of a massive display of aurora. For me, this was my first Kp8 to 9 show (to use one measure of aurora intensity) in more than 20 years, back in the film era!

Throughout the day, aurora chasers’ phones (mine included) had been beeping with alerts of the arrival of a major solar storm, with the usual indicators of auroral activity pinned to the top of the scale.

A NOAA satellite’s eye view of the ring of aurora May 10/11, showing it south of me in Alberta, and across the northern U.S. People in the southern U.S. saw it to their north.

As I show below, the graphic of the intensity of the band of aurora, the auroral oval, was lit up red and wide. This was a night we didn’t have to chase north to see the Northern Lights or aurora borealis — they were coming south to meet us (as I show above).

**The Kp Index was reading 9 on SpaceWeatherLive**

Observers in the southern hemisphere had the normally elusive aurora australis move much farther north than usual, bringing the Southern Lights even to tropical latitudes in Australia, South America and Africa.

The cause was a massive sunspot group on the Sun which had let off several intense solar flares.

Sunspot group 3664 was so big it could be seen with the naked eye, using solar eclipse glasses. Photo courtesy NASA.

The flares had in turn blown off parts of the Sun’s atmosphere, the corona, that anyone who saw the total eclipse a month earlier had admired so much. But a month later, the corona was being blown our way, in a series of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), to collide with Earth.

A movie of six CMEs blasting toward Earth, captured by the SOHO satellite. Courtesy NASA/ESA.

As it happened I was scheduled to give a community talk in the nearby town early in the evening of May 10, on the topic of The Amazing Sky! Watching the indicators, I could more or less promise the audience that we would indeed see an amazing sky later that evening as it got dark.

Post talk, I hurried home to get the cameras ready, choosing to forgo more hurried driving out to a scenic site in southern Alberta, for the convenience of shooting from my rural backyard. As the sky darkened, the clouds were lit purple, and curtains of aurora appeared in the clear patches.

Clouds and aurora in twilight with the 11mm TTArtisan full-frame fish-eye lens.

A bright arc of aurora shining through the purple clouds, with the 7.5mm TTArtisan circular fish-eye lens.

Something big was going on! This was promising to be the best show of Northern Lights I had seen from home in a year. (Spring 2023 had three great shows at monthly intervals, followed by an aurora drought for many months. See The Great April Aurora.)

A selfie at the start of the great aurora show of May 10, 2024.

I shot with four cameras (a Canon EOS R, Ra, R5 and R6) — two for time-lapses, one for real-time movies, and one for still images. I used the latter to take many multi-image panoramas, as they are often the best way to capture the wide extent of an aurora across the sky.

The arc of aurora in purple and white across the northern sky from home in Alberta at the start of the great display (about 11:30 p.m. MDT).

Early in the evening the arc of aurora wasn’t the usual green from oxygen, but shades of purple, pink, and even white, likely from sunlit nitrogen. The panorama above is looking north toward a strangely coloured arc of nitrogen (?) aurora.

Then after midnight a more normal curtain appeared suddenly, but toward the south, brightening and rising to engulf much of the southern sky and the sky overhead.

Looking south with the 15mm wide-angle lens.

It is at local midnight to 1 a.m. when substorms usually hit, as we are then looking straight down Earth’s magnetic tail, toward the rain of incoming aurora particles bombarding the Earth. During a substorm, the rain turns into a deluge — the intensity of the incoming electrons increases, sparking a sudden brightening of the aurora, making it dance all the more rapidly.

This is a 300° panorama of my home sky now filled with colourful curtains.

As the aurora explodes in brightness it often swirls up to the zenith (or more correctly, the magnetic zenith) to form one of the sky’s greatest sights, a coronal outburst. Rays and beams converge overhead to form a tunnel effect. It is jaw-dropping.

I’ve seen this many times from northern sites such as Churchill and Yellowknife, where the aurora often dances straight up. And from my latitude of 51° N in western Canada, the aurora does often come down to us.

But this night, people at latitudes where, at best, the aurora might be seen just as a glow on the horizon, saw it dance overhead in a corona show to rival the solar eclipse, and that other corona we saw on April 8!

This is a panorama of a substorm outburst creating an overhead corona with rays converging to the magnetic zenith (south of the true zenith), and amid clouds. The rays show a rich mix of oxygen greens and reds, as well as nitrogen blues blending to create purples. Some greens and reds are mixing to make yellows.

Yes, the long exposures of aurora photos (even those taken with phone cameras) show the colours better than your eye can see them (insensitive as our eyes are to colour in dim light). But this night portions of the arcs and rays were bright enough that greens and pinks were easily visible to the naked eye.

This is a single 9-second exposure of the peak of a bright outburst at 1 a.m. MDT. It was with the Laowa 7.5mm circular fish-eye lens at f/2 on the Canon R5 at ISO 800. It is one frame from a time-lapse sequence.

A brief outburst of a substorm created an overhead corona with bright rays converging to the magnetic zenith (south of the true zenith).

At its peak the show was changing rapidly enough, I couldn’t get to all the cameras to aim and frame them, especially the movie camera. The brightest outburst at 1 a.m. lasted just a minute — the time-lapse cameras caught it. The sequence below shows the view in 9-second exposures taken consecutively just 1 second apart.

This series shows a brief outburst of bright aurora at the magnetic zenith overhead. The time between these 7 consecutive 9-second exposures is only 1 second, so this bright outburst did not last long (little more than a minute). With the TTArtisan 7.5mm f/2 fish-eye lens on the Canon R5. Click or tap to enlarge to full screen.

Here’s another sequence of frames taken as part of a time-lapse sequence with the 11mm lens. It shows the change in the aurora over the 80 minutes or so that it was most active for me at my site.

The time between these 12 images is usually 8 minutes, though to include some interesting activity at a bright outburst, the interval is 5 minutes for three of the images around 1 a.m. Each is a 7- or 9-second exposure taken as part of a time-lapse sequence using the 11mm TTArtisan lens at f/2.8 on the Canon R at ISO 800 or 1600.

Shooting time-lapses with fish-eye lenses captures the show with a minimum of attention needed (except to adjust ISO or exposure times when the aurora brightens!). I could use the still camera (with the Laowa 15mm f/2 lens) to take individual shots, such as more selfies and home shots.

This is a single 6-second exposure with the Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 and Canon Ra at ISO 2000.

This is a single 8-second exposure with the Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 on the Canon Ra at ISO 800. Another camera taking a time-lapse is in the scene. I had four going this night.

As colourful as the aurora was at its best between midnight and 1:30 a.m., I think the most unique shots came after the show had subsided to appear just as faint rays across the north again, much as it had begun. To the eye it didn’t look like much, but even on the camera’s live screen I could see unusual colours.

I took more panoramas, to capture one of the most unusual auroral arcs I’ve even seen — a blue and magenta aurora across the north, similar to how the night started.

This a stitch of 11 segments, each 13-second exposures, with the Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 on the Canon Ra camera at ISO 800, and turned to portrait orientation. Processed in Camera Raw and stitched with PTGui.

The colours may be from nitrogen glowing, which tends to light up in blues and purples, especially when illuminated by sunlight at high altitudes. At 2 to 2:30 a.m. the Sun might have been illuminating the aurora at a height of 150 to 400 km, and far to the north.

I’d seen blue-topped green auroras before (and there’s a green aurora off to the west at left here). But this was the first time I’d seen an all-blue aurora, no doubt a product of the intense energy flowing in the upper atmosphere this night. And the season and my latitude.

The panorama is a spherical projection spanning 360º, and reaching to the zenith 90° high at centre. This a stitch of 20 segments, each 13-second exposures, with the Laowa 15mm lens at f/2 on the Canon Ra camera at ISO 800, and turned to portrait orientation. Processed in Camera Raw and stitched with PTGui.

The weirdest aurora was at 2:30 a.m., when in addition to the blue rays of nitrogen, an odd white and magenta patch appeared briefly to the south. What was that??

The lesson here? During a bright show do not go back to sleep when things seem to be dying down. Interesting phenomena can appear in the post-storm time, as we’ve learned with STEVE and other odd red arcs and green proton blobs that we aurora photographers have helped document.

I end with a finale music video, mostly made of the time-lapses I shot this night.

Enjoy!

Bring on more aurora shows as the Sun peaks in activity, perhaps this year. But the best shows often occur in the 2 or 3 years after solar max. So we have several more years to look forward to seeing the Lights dance in our skies.

Watch in full screen and in 4K if you can. For all the tech details click through to YouTube and check the description below the video.

Thanks and clear skies!

— Alan, May 18, 2024 amazingsky.com

April 28, 2024

The Total Eclipse of 2024 — The Video

I present a two-minute video set to music of the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse.

In my previous blog Chasing the Cross Continental Eclipse I told the tale of my chase to see the total eclipse of the Sun. I ended up under mostly clear skies in the Eastern Townships of Québec, Canada, not Texas, my original destination.

Here I present the result of shooting with four cameras that afternoon, taking still images, time-lapses, and a 4K movie.

Be sure to watch in 4K!

The site worked out very well, as the lower Sun in eastern Canada lent itself to views framing the eclipse over a landscape below, in this case a very wavy lake. But I was lucky to have open water as other lakes in the area were still frozen.

My post-eclipse selfie at the Lac Brome site in Quebec for the April 8, 2024 total eclipse of the Sun.

As it was, a snow storm a few days earlier left lots of snow in the area to be included in my post-eclipse selfie.

The description below the video on YouTube provides lots of information about the images used in the video. Click through to the video’s page on YouTube to learn more.

This was only the third total solar eclipse I’ve seen from Canada, after February 26, 1979 from Manitoba, and August 1, 2008 from the air out of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. The next total eclipse from Canada passes over my home in Alberta. But it is not until August 22, 2044!

— Alan, April 28, 2024 — AmazingSky.com

April 21, 2024April 21, 2024

Chasing the Cross-Continental Eclipse

I had always planned to drive to the April 8, 2024 total eclipse of the Sun. But to where? I ended up on the other side of the continent than originally planned.

It is not often the path of the Moon’s shadow crosses your home country, let alone continent. Only once before in recent years, on August 21, 2017, did the narrow shadow path pass near enough to my home in Alberta to allow me to drive to a total eclipse. They almost always require flying.

Packed and ready to hit the highway for a long eclipse trip.

Yes, while I could drive to the April 8, 2024 eclipse, it was going to demand a much longer drive than in 2017. But driving allowed me to take a carload of telescope and camera gear. So that was the plan.

My destination was San Antonio, Texas. That’s where I had made a hotel booking more than a year earlier. The weather prospects in Texas were forecast to be best (at least according to the long-term averages) of any locations along the path in the U.S. or Canada. (I did not want to drive into Mexico.)

On March 30, with some trepidation, I set out down I-15 heading south. I got as far as Great Falls, Montana, my stop for night one. But it was to be a move in the wrong direction.

The forecast for Eclipse Day as of March 30. Blue is bad; white is good!

The various long-range weather models were all agreeing, even 10 days in advance, that Texas (covered in blue above) was looking poor for eclipse day. But eastern Canada looked good! That was the exact opposite of what had been expected.

So on Easter Sunday, I turned around and headed north, crossing back into Canada at a lonely border post in southwest Saskatchewan.

I proceeded east along the TransCanada, Highway 1. I decided against a route across the northern U.S. and around the southern end of Lake Michigan, to avoid severe weather forecast for the middle of the U.S.

One of my daily Facebook travelogue posts with a beer of the day.

Along the way I posted my beer-du-jour travel reports, as above from Day 8, that day from within the shadow path at last!

I also stopped at the only total eclipse site, of the 16 I had seen previously, I have ever been able to re-visit. On February 26, 1979 I and a small band of friends from Edmonton viewed the mid-winter eclipse (the last one visible from southern Canada) from a median road (Firdale Road as it is now called) on the TransCanada Highway near Carberry, Manitoba. I found the spot again, where I saw (and shot with my Questar telescope) my first total eclipse of the Sun.

However, a day after entering Ontario, the bad weather caught up with me, forcing an extra night north of Lake Superior while the only highway across the region, Highway 17, was cleared of snow and re-opened at Wawa, the usual cross-Canada choke point.

My new destination (after abandoning the site in the Texas Hill Country) was to be southern Ontario.

However, as eclipse day approached and the weather predictions became more precise, it was apparent that Ontario would also be under some cloud. Southern Québec was looking better. So the Eastern Townships became my new Plan A site! I was running out of time!

Using the TPE app to check the Sun’s location once on site, the day before the eclipse.

I arrived on site in Québec with only a day to spare to check out the location I had found by exploring Google maps.

With the Sun lower in the mid-afternoon sky in Québec compared to the high-noon Sun in Texas, I decided to shoot a wide-angle scene of the eclipse over a lake, preferably with open water, not ice! That required a site with public parking on an eastern lakeshore.

The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) app to check Sun angles.

The site I found, then checked out on April 7, was on Lac Brome. It proved ideal — except for the thin cloud that was now predicted to drift through during the eclipse.

Sure enough, that’s just what happened. The cloud detracted from the eclipse only in preventing long-exposure images recording the outermost streamers in the Sun’s atmosphere.

A wide-field view of the eclipse of the Sun, taking in the bright planets Jupiter (at top) and Venus (below) that were easily visible to the unaided eye during totality.

I could have sought out clearer skies by going even farther east, but I was in a crunch for time and hotel rooms! As it was I was able to get rooms everywhere I wanted and at normal “non-eclipse” rates!

A panorama of the lakeside parking area at Lac Brome prior to the eclipse.

The Lac Brome site filled with cars during the day, with people from Québec and Ontario, but also from Alberta, and from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine – at least those were the homes of the folks I enjoyed meeting on eclipse day.

Everyone had a great time and had a superb eclipse experience.

The total eclipse of the Sun over the waters of Lac Brome, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Canada. The twilight colours come from sunlight from outside the shadow path.

The lunar shadow arrived from the southwest, from the direction of the Sun, appearing as a dark cloud racing toward us. At the end of the eclipse the sky brightened first in that same direction, as the trailing edge of the shadow shot up across the sky. The clouds helped make the shadow edge more visible.

A time-lapse of the arrival and departure of the lunar shadow, made of 1200 frames each 1 second apart.

I shot with five cameras, just as I had done in 2017, possible only because I drove.

The main rig was my faithful Astro-Physics Traveler, a 105mm refractor telescope the company owner designed for his personal use at the 1991 eclipse in Mexico.

My main eclipse rig, with a 60mm visual scope on the 105mm photo scope, on an equatorial tracking mount.

My Traveler, bought in 1992, has lived up to its name, having now been to six central solar eclipses: the annular eclipses of 1994 (Arizona) and 2023 (Utah), and the total eclipses of 1998 (Curaçao), 2012 (Queensland, Australia), 2017 (Idaho), and now 2024 in Québec, Canada. I paired it with the wonderful matching AP400 mount, which I had only just brought back with me the month before from Australia, where it had spent the last two decades.

All the gear worked great. Unlike six months earlier for the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse in Utah, this time I remembered all the cables needed to have the telescope mount track the Sun.

I did mess up on a couple of settings (such as not framing the 4K movie camera as I should have – in pre-eclipse excitement I just forgot to check my chart). But none of the errors were serious.

The eclipse in a blend of two exposures to display all the fiery pink prominences that were visible during totality around the lunar disk in one image, set against the bright inner corona of the Sun with the dark disk of the Moon in silhouette in front of the Sun.

Once started all my cameras, except for the one on the Traveler, ran unattended.

At this eclipse I was determined to get a good look at it through the small visual scope I had piggybacked onto the Traveler photo scope. While I had used a similar rig in 2017, I only thought to look through the visual scope 20 seconds before totality ended.

Not this year.

A telescopic close-up of the eclipsed Sun. Onto the central blend of images for totality I layered in single images of each of the diamond rings before and after totality. They are when the last or first burst of sunlight shines through lunar valleys. The first diamond ring is at top left, the last at bottom right, so time runs from left to right.

I got a great look at the eclipsed Sun, its corona structures, flaming pink prominences, and breakout of the red chromosphere layer just as totality ended. (You can’t easily see the chromosphere at the start of totality as it can be risky looking too soon through optics when the Sun’s blindingly bright photosphere is still in view.)

This is a composite showing the sequence of events surrounding totality, from just before totality (at upper left) to just after totality (at lower right), with totality in the middle. The contact images were taken 0.6 seconds apart.

And yet, as at all eclipses, I found the naked eye view the most compelling. The “black hole” Sun looked huge and unearthly. While I had binoculars handy, the same 12×36 image-stabilized binoculars I bring to most eclipses, I completely forgot to look though them, just as I forget at most eclipses!

This is a composite showing the complete sequence of the April 8, 2024 eclipse of the Sun, from first contact (at upper left) to last contact (at lower right), with totality at mid-eclipse in the middle.

I shot all the images with the Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm refractor at 630mm focal length and f/6, with the Canon R5 at ISO 100. The partial phases are 1/800 or 1/400 second exposures through a Kendrick/Baader solar filter.

Wanting to record the full sequence, I shot the partial phases until the bitter end. But post-eclipse, people came over and had a look through my scope (I think mine was the only telescope on site). We had a great time exchanging impressions. The hand-held phone camera photos people showed me looked fabulous!

I looked for fleeting shadow bands just before and after totality (I laid out a white sheet on the ground for the purpose) but saw none, a negative observation confirmed by a fellow eclipse chaser at the site.

Time-lapse movies of the second and third contact (start and end of totality) diamond rings, shot through the telescope with the Canon R5 in continuous burst mode for hundreds of frames each.

I did two live interviews for CBC Radio, for the Edmonton and Calgary stations, but not until after the eclipse ended. By the time I did those and finished packing away my carload of gear, it was 6:30 p.m., three hours after totality.

I was the last to leave the site, with fishermen now arriving for an evening’s catch.

I was in that shadow as the Space Station flew over. Astronauts saw the elliptical shadow moving over eastern Canada.

The passage of the lunar shadow across the continent, showing where the clouds were. I was under the wispy clouds at upper right in Québec.

I faced no traffic jams heading back to the hotel at Ste. Helen-de-Bagot. I processed and posted one eclipse image that night. And I revised the price (down to $2.99 U.S.) and description of my How to Photograph the Solar Eclipses ebook, as now only the big processing chapter is of any value, post-eclipse. It continues to sell.

This is the waxing crescent Moon on April 10, 2024, two days after it eclipsed the Sun, and with it above the bright planet Jupiter, with it also near Uranus. Below the solar system worlds is the faint Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, visible here as a fuzzy star with a stubby tail..

On the long drive back to Alberta, with the pressure of having to make time now gone, I spent pleasant evenings stopping to see friends and family on the road home. So I didn’t start work on the complex blends and composite images I show here until I got home a week after the eclipse.

The happy eclipse chaser having bagged his game!

The 17-day-long drive was nearly 9,000 km over 100 hours behind the wheel. Was it worth it? Of course!

Would I do it again? It’s a moot question as none of the upcoming eclipses allows for a cross-continent drive. Except perhaps in July 2028 in Australia. But I suspect just heading inland a day or two over the Great Dividing Range will be enough to get away from winter coastal cloud in New South Wales. (Sydney is in the path, but so is a cottage I rented last month near Coonabarabran for my superb March stay under the southern skies!)

The next total eclipse of the Sun visible from anywhere in Canada will be August 22, 2044. I won’t have to drive anywhere, as it passes right over my house! But I will have to live that long to enjoy a eclipse from my own backyard.

I suspect this was my last chance to see – and drive to – a total eclipse in Canada.

February 21, 2024February 21, 2024

Tutorials and Tips for the Solar Eclipse

As eclipse day approaches here are some tips and video tutorials from me about how best to capture the total eclipse of April 8, 2024.

There are many ways to capture great images and movies of a total eclipse of the Sun. I outline them all in great detail in my 380-page ebook How to Capture the Solar Eclipses, linked to at right.

Originally published in June 2023, I revised the ebook following the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun to include “lessons learned at the eclipse,” and some processing tutorials on assembling annular eclipse composites. I’ve also added new content on using software to control cameras and updated information about solar filters.

Brief Tips and Techniques

The August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse over the Grand Tetons as seen from the Teton Valley in Idaho, near Driggs. With the Canon 6D and 14mm SP Rokinon lens at f/2.5 for 1/10 second at ISO 100.

My breakdown of recommend methods, in order from simplest to most complex, and with increasing demands on your time, is generally this:

Use a Phone Camera for a Movie. While they can be used for a quick handheld grab shot during totality, a better method is to place a phone on a tripod using a clamp of some kind. Then a few minutes before totality aim and frame the scene, with no filter over the camera lens. Start it in movie mode to record video of the eclipse and sky changes, and the excited sounds of your group! Just remember to stop the video shortly after the end of totality and aim the phone away from the Sun. Never leave any unfiltered camera aimed at the Sun for a long time.
Shoot a Wide-Angle Time-Lapse. Using a DSLR or mirrorless camera and a wide-angle lens (it might need to be as wide as a 14mm at sites in Mexico and the southern U.S.) aim and frame the camera to include the Sun and landscape below. Focus the lens! And leave it on manual focus. But put the camera into Auto-Exposure Aperture Priority (Av) with wide-area metering and with it set to underexpose by -1 EV Exposure Compensation. With the camera at ISO 100 or 200, use either its internal intervalometer (if it has one) or an external intervalometer to take frames once per second. Start the sequence with no filter on the lens a few minutes before totality. Let it run on its own until a few minutes after totality. The result is hundreds of frames you can turn into a time-lapse movie of the lunar shadow approaching and receding, and of the changes in sky colours. Or you can extract single frames at key points to process individually, as I did for the image above from August 2017. The advantage, as with the phone camera movie method, is that the camera, once going, requires no further attention. You can enjoy the eclipse!
Shoot a Telephoto Video. Use a 300mm to 500mm lens on a DSLR or mirrorless camera to shoot a real-time close-up video of the eclipse. Start the video a minute or two before totality with the Sun positioned to the left of frame centre and with a solar filter over the lens. Use a slow ISO, the lens wide open (typically f/4 to f/5.6) and the camera on Auto-Exposure Aperture Priority (Av). Just be careful to focus precisely on the filtered Sun before starting the video. Poor focus is what spoils most eclipse images, not poor exposure. Just before totality (about 30 seconds prior to Second Contact) remove the filter. The auto-exposure will compensate and provide a proper exposure for the rest of totality. Just let the camera run and the Sun drift across the frame from left to right. Just remember to replace the filter, or cap the lens, and stop the video shortly (~30 seconds) after totality and Third Contact. The video will capture the diamond rings and a well-exposed corona. Vary the exposure compensation during totality if you wish, but that involves more work at the camera. Otherwise, you can just let the camera run. But, as I illustrate in my ebook, it’s important to plan and place the Sun correctly to begin with (using a planetarium app to plan the sequence), so it does not drift off the frame or close to the edge.
Shoot Telephoto Close-Up Stills. Use the same type of gear to shoot still images. While you could shoot stills on Auto-Exposure, it’s better to shoot still images over a range of exposures, from very short (~1/1000 second) for the diamond rings and prominences, to long (~1 second) for the outer corona. No one exposure can capture all that the eye can see during totality. This takes more work at the camera, and with the camera on a static tripod you might have to re-centre the Sun during totality, another thing to fuss with and where things can go wrong. Using the camera’s Auto-Bracketing mode can help automate the shooting, allowing the camera to automatically shoot a set of 7 to 9 exposures at say, one-stop increments in quick succession with just one press of the shutter button (by using the self-timer set to 2 seconds).
Shoot with a Telescope on a Tracking Mount. Telescopes (I like 60mm- to 100mm-aperture apochromatic refractors) allow longer focal lengths, though I would advise against shooting with any optics longer than 600mm to 800mm, so the image frames the corona well. Use similar settings as above, but with the telescope (or a telephoto lens) on a tracking mount to turn from east to west at the same rate as the sky moves. That will ensure the Sun stays centred on its own, provided you have at least roughly polar aligned the mount. (Set it to your site’s latitude and aim the polar axis as due north as you can determine from compass apps.)

Those are brief summaries of the methods I recommend, as they are ones I’ve used with success in the past and plan to use on April 8. My ebook contains much more information, and answers to most of the “But what about using ….?” questions. And I provide lots of information on what can go wrong! Some learned the hard way over 16 previous total solar eclipses.

Video Tutorials

For a video tutorial, check out the webinar I conducted as part of the Kalamazoo Astronomical Society’s excellent Eclipse Series here on YouTube. It is about a 1-hour presentation, plus with lots of Q&A at the end.

KAS Eclipse Series — Part 1: Shooting

Of course, once you have all your images, you need to process them. My ebook’s biggest chapter (at 80 pages) is the one on processing still images and time-lapses.

So, a month after I presented the above webinar on Shooting, I was back on-line again for a follow-up webinar on Processing. You can view that KAS Eclipse Series tutorial here on YouTube.

KAS Eclipse Series — Part 2: Processing

I cover processing single wide-angle images, a wide-angle time-lapse series, single-image close-ups, and blending multiple exposure composites.

A month later, I presented a further webinar to the Astronomical League as part of their AL Live series, again on shooting the eclipse, but now with an emphasis on techniques amateur astronomers and astrophotographers with typical telescope gear might use.

You can view the AL Live webinar here. My presentation begins at the 44-minute mark.

AL Live Webinar — Scrub ahead to 44 minutes

I emphasized that the kinds of gear astrophotographers use these days with great success on deep-sky objects might not work well for the eclipse. The specialized cameras, and software used to control them, are just not designed for the demands of a total eclipse, where exposures have to range over a wide array of settings and change very quickly. Images have to be taken and recorded in rapid succession.

I suspect a lot of ambitious and overly-confident astrophotographers will come away from the 2024 eclipse disappointed — and what’s worse, without having seen the eclipse because they were too wrapped up looking at laptop screens trying to get their high-tech gear working.

Practice, Practice, Practice

In these webinars and in my ebook, my common theme is the importance of practicing.

Don’t assume something will work. Practice with the gear you intend to use, on the Sun now (with proper filters) and on the Moon. The crescent Moon, with dim Earthshine lighting the lunar night side, is a great practice target because of its wide range of brightness. And it moves like the Sun will, to check maximum exposure times vs. image blurring from motion.

Practice with your tripod or mount aimed to the altitude and location in the sky where the Sun will be from the site you have chosen. Set a tracking mount to the latitude you will be at to be sure it will aim at and track the Sun without issues. Some telescope mounts stop tracking when they reach due south, exactly where the Sun will be at totality from southern sites. That’s a nasty surprise you do not want to encounter on eclipse day.

All this and much more is covered in my ebook, available for Apple Books and as a PDF for all platforms here from my website at https://www.amazingsky.com/EclipseBook

Good luck on eclipse day!

— Alan, February 21, 2024

June 11, 2023

How To Photograph the Solar Eclipses

My latest ebook describes in detail the many techniques we can use to capture great still images and movies of the 2023 and 2024 eclipses of the Sun.

In the next few months we have two major eclipses of the Sun visible from North America.

On October 14, 2023 the Moon will cross the disk of the Sun creating a partial eclipse. But from along a narrow path in the western U.S. the Moon’s disk will be centered on the Sun’s disk but not be large enough to completely cover it. For a few minutes, viewers will see an “annular” eclipse, as above, as what remains of the Sun forms a brilliant ring of light around the dark disk of the Moon.

Six lunar months later, the Moon again crosses the Sun but is now large enough to completely cover the Sun’s bright disk. The result is the most spectacular celestial sight, a total eclipse of the Sun, on April 8, 2024. The last such total solar eclipse (TSE) in North America was on August 21, 2017, shown above. After 2024, the next TSE in southern North America will not be until August 23, 2044. (There’s a TSE in northern Alaska on March 30, 2033.)

In 2017 I prepared an ebook about how to shoot that year’s total eclipse. This year I revised and expanded the book extensively to cover both the 2023 annular and 2024 total eclipses. The new 350-page ebook explains how to frame the eclipses depending on where you are along the paths. New information covers the advances in camera gear, with more details added on shooting video. Revised tutorials cover new software and processing techniques.

Above is the ebook’s Contents page, so you can see what topics it covers, over an extensive 350 pages. I provide not only advice on lots of techniques and gear, but also suggestions for what not to do, and what can go wrong!

The Fundamentals

I discuss the filters needed, comparing the various types available, and when to use them, and when to remove them. (A filter is always needed for the annular eclipse, but failing to remove the filter is a common failing at a total eclipse!)

For the 2023 annular eclipse I explain how to shoot close-ups, but also another type of image, the multiple exposure composite. Framing, timing and exposing correctly are crucial.

I do the same for the 2024 total eclipse, as a wide-angle shot of the eclipsed Sun over a landscape is one of the easiest ways to capture the event. It’s possible to set up a camera to take the images automatically, leaving you free to enjoy the view of the event without fussing with gear. I explain how best to do that.

For both eclipses, many people will want to shoot close-ups with telephoto lenses or telescopes. It takes more work and more can go wrong, but I show what’s required for equipment and exposures, and explain how to avoid the common flaws of fuzzy focus and trailed images.

But good exposure is also essential. However, for a total eclipse close-up, no one exposure is best. It takes a range of exposures to record the wide dynamic range of phenomena during totality. That demands work at the camera.

Setting Cameras

I show how we can use a camera’s auto-bracketing function to help automate the process of taking a set of exposures, from short exposures for the prominences, to long for the faint outer corona.

Another option is using a continuous burst mode to capture the fleeting moments of the diamond rings at the start and end of totality in 2024. But this can also be useful for capturing the “reverse Baily’s beads” that appear briefly as the Moon reaches the inner contact points at the start and end of the annular phase of the 2023 eclipse.

Using a tracking mount can help with shooting a set of images during totality. I describe the options for choosing the right mount and telescope, and how to set it up for accurate tracking. I discuss the advantages — and pitfalls — of using a tracking mount.

Shooting Video

Video is now an important feature of many cameras. But the choices of formats and settings can be daunting! 4K, 8K, 4K HQ — what to use? I illustrate the differences, using the best practice target, the crescent Moon.

Choosing the right contrast curve for your video — such as CLog3 here — can also make a big difference to the final video quality. It’s important to get that right. You have only one chance!

I also devote a chapter to shooting time-lapses, with wide-angle lenses and telescopes.

Image Processing

Chapter 11 is the biggest, with 68 pages of tutorials on how to process eclipse images, using the latest software. I show the benefit new AI tools can provide, but also the oddities they can impart to eclipse images.

I illustrate how to use HDR software (comparing sample results from several popular programs) to blend multiple exposures for greater dynamic range.

I illustrate other methods of stacking and blending exposure sets, such as luminosity masks and stack modes. Examples are all with Adobe products, but the methods are applicable to other layer-based programs such as Affinity Photo.

The processing chapter ends with illustrations on how to create layered composites from images taken at multiple stages of an eclipse.

What Can Go Wrong?

The ebook ends with advice for the ambitious (!) on how best to use several cameras to capture different aspects of the eclipse. And I includes lots of tips and checklists to ensure all goes well on eclipse day — or what to do for Plan B if all does not go well!

The ebook is available for Apple Books (for Macs and iPads) and as a PDF for all devices. Links to buy and more details on ebook content are at my website at www.amazingsky.com/EclipseBook.

I’ll be posting more eclipse “tips and techniques” blogs in the coming months, so be sure to subscribe.

Thanks and clear skies!

— Alan, June 2023