Astro-Physics – The Amazing Sky

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.

October 31, 2023October 31, 2023

Chasing the Annular Eclipse

Like all eclipses, seeing the October 14 annular eclipse of the Sun was not a certainty. As good luck and planning would have it, the sky and location could not have been better!

Annular eclipses of the Sun don’t present the spectacle of a total eclipse. Because the Moon is near its farthest point from Earth, its disk is not large enough to completely cover the Sun. At mid-eclipse, as I show below, a ring of sunlight (dubbed a “ring of fire”) remains, still too bright to view without a solar filter.

The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a single image captured at mid-eclipse, at 10:29 am MDT at the Ruby’s Inn Overlook on the rim of Bryce Canyon, Utah, a site well south of the centreline, with 3m03s of annularity.

While lacking the jaw-dropping beauty of a total, annular eclipses are rare and unique enough that every ardent skywatcher should make a point of seeing one.

Prior to October 14, I had seen only one, on May 10, 1994, from southeast Arizona, an event I captured on film of course back then.

My 1994 annular eclipse setup in Arizona

A sunset annular on June 10, 2002 that I traveled to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to see was mostly clouded out. The annular of May 20, 2012 traced a similar path across the U.S. Southwest as the 2023 eclipse. But work commitments at the science centre in Calgary kept me home for that one. A sunrise annular on June 10, 2021 in Northwestern Ontario was essentially out of reach due to COVID travel restrictions.

With no other annular eclipses within easy reach in North America until 2039 and 2046, this was my next, and perhaps last, opportunity to see one, unless I chose to travel the world.

I had planned for several months to watch the annular eclipse from southern Utah, ideally from Bryce Canyon National Park, shown above. (Clicking on the images brings them up full screen.) I booked accommodations in January 2023, finding even then that popular hotels in the area were already sold out.

The final spot for the wide-angle composite shown below. The camera had to be next to that very fence post to frame the scene well.

The attraction was the landscape below the morning Sun, for a planned composite image of the eclipse over the hoodoos of Bryce. However, I had learned weeks earlier that traffic was going to be restricted to just park shuttle buses on eclipse day. Should Plan A not work out then Plan B was Kodachrome Basin, a state park nearby, which a park employee assured me would be open to cars well before sunrise on eclipse day.

Seen on I-15 past Salt Lake City. Eclipse ahead!

So I made my plans to drive south, taking with me a carload of telescope and camera gear, an array I would never be able to take to an overseas eclipse. The centrepiece was my venerable Astro-Physics Traveler 105mm (4-inch) refractor, a telescope created for the 1991 total eclipse in Mexico. Since I bought mine in 1992 I’ve used it for five central solar eclipses, including now two annulars. It’s in the 1994 and 2023 site images above.

As per the instructions in my eclipse ebook, I practiced with the gear in the summer of 2023, documented here on my previous blog.

A week before the eclipse (as above at left), the weather prospects for the entire southwest looked poor. It was to be clouds everywhere. I even considered Plan S – Stay Home! And watch the 60% partial eclipse from Alberta where skies were to be clear.

But undaunted, six days before the eclipse, I headed south on Interstate 15, checking the weather each day, and seeking out Plan C sites in New Mexico or Texas south of the projected mass of clouds. I checked where accommodation could be had at the last minute.

At my stop in Richfield, Utah, four days before the eclipse, I had a crossroads turning point: either continue south to Bryce down US-89 (above), or head east on I-70, then south into New Mexico or Texas, with enough time to get there if needed.

But by now the weather prospects were turning around. By three days out, and with the forecasts now much more reliable, it looked like southern Utah would be in the clear. I continued with my original plan to Bryce. But where exactly?

I had looked at possible sites on Google Earth and with the Sun-angle planning apps I use (such as The Photographer’s Ephemeris, or TPE) and found one just outside the Park that I hoped would be accessible to drive into.

Upon arriving in the area three days early, the first priority was to inspect the site in person. It looked perfect! Almost too good to be true!

A panorama of the Ruby’s Inn site with the eclipse in progress. My wide-angle camera is at left by that fencepost.

The site, known as the Ruby’s Inn Overlook, provided a great view toward the eclipse with a stunning landscape below, including a river! (Well, it was actually an irrigation channel called the Tropic Ditch.) And I could park right next to my wide-angle landscape camera, to keep an eye on it over the five hours of shooting, while setting up the scope gear next to my car.

I stayed at the Bryce View Lodge on eclipse eve, a hotel just a few hundred metres from the site. So no long pre-dawn drive on eclipse morn. However, the gated site was not going to be open until 7 a.m. on eclipse day. And admission was $20 per car, a cash donation to the Bryce Canyon City school sports teams. Fine!

As it turned out, by the time I got on site and setup the priority wide-angle camera for the base-image sunrise shots at 7:30 a.m., the sky was too bright to polar align the telescope mount on Polaris, for accurate tracking of the Sun across the sky.

It turned out that was the least of my concerns.

My three eclipse cameras: the wide-angle, the one on the 105mm refractor telescope (with a smaller 60mm scope on top for visual views with a Herschel Solar Wedge), and one with a 100-400mm lens on the tripod.

As I unpacked the carload of scope gear at 8 a.m. I realized I had forgotten a crucial cable to connect the mount to the drive electronics. So the mount was not going to be able to track anyway!

So much for my plans for a time-lapse through the scope. I had to manually centre the Sun every minute or so. I took lots of photos, but gave up on any effort to take them at a regular cadence. But I had enough images for the singles and composites shown here.

This is a composite of the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse with a sequence of six images showing the Moon advancing across a sunspot, the largest one visible on the Sun that day. The images are placed for a photogenic spacing, with time running forward from lower left to upper right, to reflect the Sun’s motion up across the morning sky.

Of course, once I got home the first thing I did was look downstairs in my scope room. Sure enough there was the cable, mixed up with the similar electronics from another mount I have from the same company, as I had been testing both prior to the eclipse. So much for my checklists! They’re only good if they list every critical bit, and if you use them.

So that was one big user error.

You don’t want to see this at an eclipse!

The other was a camera error, in fact Error70! I had set my main telescope camera to take rapid bursts of images (at up to 20 frames per second) at the crucial second and third contacts when annularity began and ended. With the Moon’s rough limb tangent to the inside edge of the Sun, you see beads of light rapidly form and disappear at the contacts.

This is a composite of the October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse at second contact. It illustrates the irregular edge of the Moon breaking up the rim of sunlight as the dark disk of the Moon became tangent to the inner edge of the Sun at second contact at the start of annularity. 15 exposures taken over 20 seconds at second contact are combined with a single exposure taken about 1.5 minutes later at mid-annularity.

The camera worked great at second contact, shooting 344 frames over 20 seconds. A composite of 15 of those frames is above, layered to exaggerate the rough lunar limb and its mountain peaks. A time-lapse from those frames is below.

A time-lapse of second contact from 344 frames over ~20 seconds.

And it appeared to be working at third contact three minutes later. Until I looked down and saw the dreaded error message. In checking the camera later, none of the third contact images had recorded to either memory card.

It is a known but intermittent bug in Canon firmware that can happen when the camera is not connected to a Canon lens (it was on a telescope it cannot communicate with). I saw the error once in testing. And I had a hard time reproducing it to take the screen shot above once I got home. But if something can go wrong …!

This is a portrait of the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun, captured in a sequence of images taken from the rim of Bryce Canyon, Utah, from sunrise until nearly the end of the eclipse before noon local time. This is a composite blend of unfiltered exposures taken at sunrise for the landscape lit by the rising Sun, and for the dawn sky. Onto the base panorama of the ground and sky I layered in 66 filtered images of the Sun, as it rose into the morning sky, and with the Moon moving across its disk over nearly 3 hours, reaching mid-eclipse at about 10:29 local MDT at upper right. It then appears as a ring, or annulus of light for one frame.

Despite the errors both human and machine, I count eclipse day as successful, considering a week earlier prospects had looked so poor. As it was, apart from some thin but inconsequential cloud that drifted through before mid-eclipse, the sky was perfect.

As was the site. I enabled me to get the main shot I was after, the wide-angle composite, above. It’s a winner! And it accurately depicts the size of the Sun and its motion across the sky, albeit set into a twilight sky taken at sunrise.

As it had been 29 years since my last annular, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But the darkening of the sky and eerie level of sunlight, despite a blazing Sun in the day sky, were impressive. The morning just looked strange! It was a taste of the total to come.

Venus at its widest angle west of the Sun was easy to spot in the deep blue sky. I regret not thinking to shoot even a phone camera image of that sight.

Projecting the solar crescents with a made-on-the-spot pinhole projection sign.

I had pleasant chats with other folks at the site, and enjoyed showing them telescopic views though the smaller visual scope I had piggybacked on the main scope, one that was just for looking through. Plus folks shot phone pix of my camera screen.

The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a single image captured at second contact with the Moon tangent to the inside limb of the Sun, at 10:27 am MDT at the site I used.

But at the critical contacts, I was glued to that visual scope for the amazing sight of the horns of the crescent Sun rapidly wrapping around the Moon at second contact, then unwrapping at third contact.

The October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, in a series of images captured at second contact with the Moon tangent to the inside limb of the Sun, at 10:27 am MDT at the site I used. The 7 frames here were selected from a set of 344 shot in high-speed continuous mode at 20 frames per second.

The breakup of the rim of sunlight into beads of light along the cratered and mountainous edge of the Moon was also impressive. I was not at the optimum site for seeing those beads, as the landscape dictated my choice of location. But those that I saw at each of the internal contacts were a fine bonus to a memorable morning.

This is a composite that records the sequence around mid-eclipse of the October 14, 2023 annular eclipse of the Sun. This is a blend of 8 exposures each taken 2.25 minutes apart, about the minimum time to keep the disks separate and avoid them overlapping.

A third camera shooting a sequence with an untracked 400mm telephoto lens worked well. I used a subset of its images to create a still-image composite (above) and the full set for a time-lapse (below), with the position and motion of the Sun authentic, produced by the natural east-to-west motion of the sky. But against that you see the Moon’s orbital motion moving its dark disk down across the disk of the Sun.

A time-lapse from 300 frames taken at 4-second intervals with the sky’s motion carrying the Sun across the frame.

As soon as annularity ended, everyone else started to pack up and leave. For them the show was over. Understandably. On many total eclipse tours I’ve been on we’ve been on the road back to the hotel after totality and the requisite happy group shot.

Eclipse success! The trophy shot after everyone else had left.

But at this eclipse my shooting plan dictated that I stick it out. By the end of the eclipse I was the last one standing, alone to enjoy last contact and then lunch, killing time for any road congestion to diminish, as I had to head to another motel for the post-eclipse night, in nearby Panguitch.

I had a celebratory dinner and Moab-brewed beer that night at Cowboy’s, the best restaurant in Panguitch, sporting my Annular 2023 eclipse hat!

But the next day I started the drive north again, for the three-day trek back up I-15 to the border, then home.

Priority one upon getting home was to finish processing images, and to include them in a revised version of my ebook How to Photograph the Solar Eclipses. It is linked to above and here on the title. Images of some sample pages from the revised edition are in the slide show below.

Post-annular, the book’s title remains the same, but I revised the pages in Chapter 4 on planning for the 2023 eclipse with pages on “lessons learned!” And there were several!

I expanded Chapter 11 on processing to include tutorials on assembling annular eclipse composites, now that I actually have some!

Such as the composite of first- to last-contact telescopic close-ups below.

This is a composite of the various stages of the entire October 14, 2023 annular solar eclipse, from start (lower left) to end (upper right), with mid-eclipse at centre. So time runs forward from left to right, with the Suns positioned to reflect the approximate motion of the Sun in the morning sky when this eclipse occured at my site, with it rising higher through the progress of the eclipse. North is up in this image.

The new version of my ebook is 20 pages larger than the pre-annular edition.

An email has gone out from eJunkie to all buyers of the earlier-edition PDF to alert them to the new version, and with a download link. Apple Books readers should get a notice when they open the book on their Mac or iPad in the Books app that a new version is available.

I suspect that will be the last revision of my ebook before the big event – the total eclipse of the Sun on April 8, 2024.

Here’s wishing us all clear skies for that one! That eclipse will indeed require a drive to Texas. This time I’ll remember that damned cable!

— Alan Dyer, October 31, 2023

amazingsky.com

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.

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