totm may 2024 "Great American Eclipse" II: April 8 2024

[cubinator]

It is time to have plans made, and almost time to start watching the weather. Climate is a lot more menacing this time around, with the majority of the path being under frequently cloudy regions. In 2017 it was pretty easy to just head out into the desert and be pretty sure it would be clear. Still, this has been a year unlike any other. What are your plans?

[Pthigrivi]

Yeah Im psyched. My wife and I will be taking the afternoon off. We're in VT so it's running straight over us. Fingers crossed on weather!

[PakledHostage]

I had thought about traveling with my family to San Antonio for a vacation centered on viewing the eclipse from west of there, but the combination of cost of the trip and reliability of the weather made me decide to skip it. I viewed the 2017 one from Oregon, and that was awesome, but I'm less confident that my luck would hold this time. (West Texas has the highest probability of clear skies in the US for this eclipse,  but even there it's only ~50%.)

Edit: There's also the issue of price gouging... Hotels (even Days Inn and Motel 6) under the path of the eclipse in west Texas were going for $900 USD per night for the three nights bracketing the eclipse when I looked last April. In 2017, hotels, etc. missed out inflating their prices early so you could get a fair price if you booked a year in advance.  They then started canceling people's reservations and re-listing the rooms at 10 times the price, but (at least in Oregon) the state government cracked down and imposed severe penalties on hotels that did that. This time, the hotels and other tourist amenities got smart, so unless you're wealthy or super keen to see it, it's probably not worth traveling for it.

Edit 2: If you want to travel for an eclipse,  the August 2nd 2027 one is probably the best bet. It's in the saros series containing the longest periods of totality of all current saros series, and it passes over the deserts of Northern Africa.  Maximum totality during that eclipse will last upwards of 6 minutes,  compared to only ~2 minutes for 2017 and ~4 minutes for this April's eclipse. 

Edited March 7 by PakledHostage

[Superfluous J]

Totality passes by roughly 30 miles from my house, so I'm taking the day off and going out with a makeshift pinhole camera.

[StrandedonEarth]

4 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

This time, the hotels and other tourist amenities got smart, so unless you're wealthy or super keen to see it, it's probably not worth traveling for it.

Hmmm, I wonder if the RV parks have cranked their rates too. Not that we would make it there…

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, StrandedonEarth said:

Hmmm, I wonder if the RV parks have cranked their rates too. Not that we would make it there…

Probably. 

 

I was browsing some eclipse links online today and finally learned just how many food trucks, ticketed events, and private property parking for sale is going to be occurring in every small town along the path in Texas. It's going to be, at best, mild madness.

Edited March 8 by cubinator
apologies for that grammar but I don't really feel like fixing it

[PakledHostage]

1 hour ago, Superfluous J said:

Totality passes by roughly 30 miles from my house, so I'm taking the day off and going out with a makeshift pinhole camera.

You can look at totality without eye protection.  In fact, you want to remove your eye protection or you'll miss it. In the moments before totality,  look at the horizon.  If there are clouds around,  you'll see the moon's shadow sweeping in over them from afar at 3000 kph or so. Then once totality starts, it'll be one of the most profound experiences you'll ever have. It gets cold and quiet. All the creatures stop doing their creature things. The sky is dark but there's twilight all around the edge. But don't look at the eclipse before/after totality without eye protection.  Even looking at it with the naked eye a couple of seconds before/after can damage your eyes.

[cubinator]

Just now, PakledHostage said:

You can look at totality without eye protection.  In fact, you want to remove your eye protection or you'll miss it. In the moments before totality,  look at the horizon.  If there are clouds around,  you'll see the moon's shadow sweeping in over them from afar at 3000 kph or so. Then once totality starts, it'll be one of the most profound experiences you'll ever have. It gets cold and quiet. All the creatures stop doing their creature things. The sky is dark but there's twilight all around the edge. But don't look at the eclipse before/after totality without eye protection.  Even looking at it with the naked eye a couple of seconds before/after can damage your eyes.

Additionally, if the sky is decently clear you should start looking for the planets when the sun's about half covered. I could see Venus and bright stars like Spica well before totality. This year's eclipse will give us a nice lineup of four bright planets. Dim Mercury I was never quite able to spot in 2017, so I wouldn't spend too much time looking for it - there are at least a dozen better things to see, and it's too dangerous to get out binoculars.

Watch for news about comet 12P as the eclipse nears - it's getting close to perihelion and has a small chance of gracing us with an outburst that might just render it visible in the sky near Jupiter. My far-out hope is that there will be a CME erupting right before the eclipse, though, solar maximum and all. But first on the list is my hope that the clouds will stay away!

[StrandedonEarth]

53 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

You can look at totality without eye protection.  In fact, you want to remove your eye protection or you'll miss it. In the moments before totality,  look at the horizon.  If there are clouds around,  you'll see the moon's shadow sweeping in over them from afar at 3000 kph or so. Then once totality starts, it'll be one of the most profound experiences you'll ever have. It gets cold and quiet. All the creatures stop doing their creature things. The sky is dark but there's twilight all around the edge. But don't look at the eclipse before/after totality without eye protection.  Even looking at it with the naked eye a couple of seconds before/after can damage your eyes.

I was going to call bullcrap, but decided to research first, and got an answer straight from one of the biggest solar experts: Safety (nasa.gov), so I would have been wrong.

Quote

Eye Safety for Total Solar Eclipses

Here are some important safety guidelines to follow during a total solar eclipse.

• View the Sun through eclipse glasses or a handheld solar viewer during the partial eclipse phases before and after totality.
• You can view the eclipse directly without proper eye protection only when the Moon completely obscures the Sun’s bright face – during the brief and spectacular period known as totality. (You’ll know it’s safe when you can no longer see any part of the Sun through eclipse glasses or a solar viewer.)
• As soon as you see even a little bit of the bright Sun reappear after totality, immediately put your eclipse glasses back on or use a handheld solar viewer to look at the Sun.

 

Edited March 8 by StrandedonEarth

[PakledHostage]

10 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

I was going to call bullcrap, but decided to research first, and got an answer straight form one of the biggest solar experts: Safety (nasa.gov)

 

Yes. They agree with what I said. I wouldn't post BS. 

[cubinator]

Just now, StrandedonEarth said:

I was going to call bullcrap, but decided to research first, and got an answer straight form one of the biggest solar experts: Safety (nasa.gov)

 

Yep, those few minutes when the Sun's surface is completely covered up are the only time you can look right at it without protection. Its atmosphere is an object you'll only ever see in that moment unless you go to space.

It's no brighter than the usual daytime sky, which means the light from the corona can't possibly penetrate the filters that makes the rest of the sun safe to look at.

[StrandedonEarth]

19 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Yes. They agree with what I said. I wouldn't post BS. 

 

18 minutes ago, cubinator said:

Yep, those few minutes when the Sun's surface is completely covered up are the only time you can look right at it without protection. Its atmosphere is an object you'll only ever see in that moment unless you go to space.

It's no brighter than the usual daytime sky, which means the light from the corona can't possibly penetrate the filters that makes the rest of the sun safe to look at.

I was under the impression that the corona still emitted UV, and under the darker skies of totality the eye's pupils open wider, letting in even more. But apparently I was mistaken or misinformed. At least it spurred me to do a little research on that. I edited that post for clarity.

[PakledHostage]

22 minutes ago, cubinator said:

My far-out hope is that there will be a CME erupting right before the eclipse, though, solar maximum and all. But first on the list is my hope that the clouds will stay away!

I managed to capture a photo of a prominence during the 2017 eclipse.  I had a program on my laptop called "Eclipse Orchestrator" that controlled my DSLR based on a pre-arranged script. I used a 600 mm lens and exposure settings that I found online. I also synced my computer's clock to a GPS beforehand for maximum accuracy.  I was able to get both "diamond rings", a prominence and about 40 photos of the corona at different exposures. I will try to upload a couple to imgur so I can post them here. 

Which reminds me of my favorite memory from that day: I was busy checking on my camera when totality first started, but shortly after that, I looked over to where my daughter was sitting in her little chair (she was just small then). She had a deathgrip on the armrest and was looking at the sky with her mouth agape.  I picked her up and she said to me "I'm not scared, Daddy". I could tell she was just acting brave. For a pre-scientific mind, it's understandably frightening to have the sky suddenly go dark in the middle of the day. My wife then snapped a photo of my daughter and I looking at the sky together.  It's one of my favorite photos.

[Ryaja]

I'm heading to texas and bringing camera gear. I hope to get a good timelapse! I might look into livestreaming it too. though NASA's will be better it'd be cool still.

[PakledHostage]

Here are three of my photos from 2017:

Diamond ring

Prominence 

Totality

This is a stack of about 8 photos with different exposures to get all that corona in one shot without being blown out or under exposed. I used a medical imaging software to align the individual bitmaps based on the sun's disk and then I wrote my own software to create a composite using vector addition of the RGB values in the bitmap pixels to get the smoothness of transition between the layers that I was hoping for.

That's Regulus you can just see in the bottom left of the image.

 

 

I was part of a project called the "Eclipse Megamovie", and they had coaching and practice sessions before the eclipse to help ensure that participants could get the best shots possible.

https://youtu.be/Z5xOcjC5-oo

[Ryaja]

11 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

Here are three of my photos from 2017:

Diamond ring

Prominence 

Totality

This is a stack of about 8 photos with different exposures to get all that corona in one shot without being blown out or under exposed. I used a medical imaging software to align the individual bitmaps based on the sun's disk and then I wrote my own software to create a composite using vector addition of the RGB values in the bitmap pixels to get the smoothness of transition between the layers that I was hoping for.

That's Regulus you can just see in the bottom left of the image.

 

 

I was part of a project called the "Eclipse Megamovie", and they had coaching and practice sessions before the eclipse to help ensure that participants could get the best shots possible.

https://youtu.be/Z5xOcjC5-oo

That's awesome, did you just use a white light filter? Also what focal length did you use?

[PakledHostage]

3 hours ago, Ryaja said:

That's awesome, did you just use a white light filter? Also what focal length did you use?

No filter at all during totality. I used a solar filter on my 600 mm camera lens ahead of totality and after,  but nothing during. As @cubinator said, the corona isn't much brighter than the daylight sky,  so simply adjusting shutter speed is enough to manage exposures. 

Edit: I should add that the corona's brightness changes by several orders of magnitude from near the sun to its outer edges. The human eye has the dynamic range to take it all in but the camera doesn't.  You have to stack images to get anything that looks like what you can see with the naked eye. I wrote my own stacking code because I wasn't happy with the results in LightRoom. Writing my own gave me the flexibility to merge the images in a more continuous gradient rather than in discrete layers.

Also, I used Eclipse Orchestrator to manage the camera automatically so that I could enjoy the eclipse. I set up a script to take about 40 different shots over the 2 minutes (some of them duplicates). The diamond rings and prominences require precise timing,  taking into account your location to a handfull of metres and time down to a couple dozen milliseconds, because they must be shot precisely when the eclipse begins and ends.

Edit 2: I should also add that I learned a trick while practicing dry runs with my script. I would use Stellarium's ocular feature to estimate how long it would take for the Sun to move from the edge of my camera's field of view to the middle.  If that was, say, 4. 3 minutes, I'd then line up the tripod with the sun at the edge of the field of view at 4.3 minutes before totality and let it drift to the centre. My lens is a 150 mm - 600 mm lense, and my camera (Canon 70D) has a 1.6 crop factor.  That means fully zoomed in to 600 mm is effectively 960 mm, which is a fairly long focal length. 

Edited March 8 by PakledHostage

[PakledHostage]

Well, what the heck... all this talk about the 2017 eclipse made me go and  book a trip for my family and I to go see totality again. Fingers crossed that the weather cooperates.

[cubinator]

51 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Well, what the heck... all this talk about the 2017 eclipse made me go and  book a trip for my family and I to go see totality again. Fingers crossed that the weather cooperates.

Best of luck.

[PakledHostage]

I see that one group is going to launch a balloon and live stream the video from aboard it:

https://www.youtube.com/live/8Ebop4PzFgM?

(Note: I got a message saying that the video settings prevent it from being embedded when I pasted it.)

[tater]

Gonna drive to SW TX. Will throw camping stuff in car, in case needed. Probably leave Saturday at some point, and stay in a hotel in NM, or not far into TX. That or drive longer and leave Sunday.

[PakledHostage]

19 minutes ago, tater said:

That or drive longer and leave Sunday.

Optimistic? After all,  there's the lament of travelers through Texas "The Sun has riz, the Sun has set, and here we is in Texas yet"

[tater]

3 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Optimistic? After all,  there's the lament of travelers through Texas "The Sun has riz, the Sun has set, and here we is in Texas yet"

It's ~14.5 hours all the way to Boca Chica from here. I can be in El Paso in 4 hours. Fredericksburg is 9.5 hours.

[PakledHostage]

I once drove from Whichita to LA. We only crossed the Texas panhandle, but it was a long drive in total. But road trips are almost always good adventures.  Enjoy. 

Fredericksburg was my first choice of destinations to see it. The western periphery of the path of totality just west of there has the highest probability of clear skies. Supposedly cloud from the Gulf of Mexico often obscures skies as far west as the centreline of the path of totality,  but it gets drier west of the centreline. So, even though you're shortening the length of totality by being west of centre, you've got a better chance of seeing it.

[cubinator]

NWS has just put out some useful resources: https://www.weather.gov/fwd/eclipse2024