This is a aerial view of the arrival and departure of the Moon's shadow, the lunar umbra, over Ellis County Texas during the total solar eclipse on April 8th, 2024.
We launched the drone just ahead of totality programmed to hover till the arrival of the lunar umbra and then orbit to film the horizon during totality.
The sky got darker than I remembered from the 2017 total solar eclipse but the way things looked as the umbra arrived, growing darker first from one direction, and then as it departed, growing light first from the direction it had arrived, was the same as to 2017.
Thankfully, we had relatively clear skies but the effect would have been similar even if it had been completely overcast. I had hoped that as the drone orbited it would capture the full 360 degree sunset effect along the horizon but it was too cloudy. You can get just a sense of it at the 58 second mark in the video.
The total phase of the eclipse at this location was 4 minutes 16 seconds. However, as the focus for this video is on the visual experience of the sky getting dark with the arrival of the umbra and growing light again with its departure, the duration of totality is edited down to about 22 seconds. As the Sun was about 65 degrees above the horizon, it was not possible to include the eclipsed solar disk in this video.
PS.
After posting this, I ran across a similar drone video from 2017 that doesn't show the lunar umbra arrival and departure but it does show the 360 degree sunset effect. Check it out here.
Details:
Filmed from a DJI Mini 2 drone using DroneLink flightplan
Processed on Mac OS with DaVinci Resolve
Music
"Eclipse"
by 1st Contact
Shared under Creative Commons License
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
The journey continues beyond 2009... check it out!
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