April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse: Initial Telescopic Images

Fine details in the solar corona

One of my primary goals for this total solar eclipse was to capture a variety of telescopic views of the eclipse. The similar goal I had in 2017 was spoiled by overcast skies that resulted in a mad dash down the road with Beau Hartwig chasing clear skies. Seeing totality with my own eyes meant giving up on my photographic goal. I don't regret that for a minute but I was thrilled that this time the skies cleared for us just in time for the "Big Show". 

To avoid having to split my attention between experiencing totality and taking pictures, I used our old 2012 MacBook Pro running a software package called Solar Eclipse Maestro to control the camera, snapping pictures at pre-defined times and exposure settings. SEM worked flawlessly and had it not been for a user-error on my part (which I'll cover in a future post), I would have captured everything I planned for. As it is, I still was able to capture most of what I planned including:

• Diamond Ring effect (though not as spectacular as that from other people due to my snafu)
• Baily's Beads effect
• Solar corona fine detail
• Earthshine (lunar surface illuminated with light reflected from Earth)
• Partial phase images (though I missed much of the first half of the eclipse due to clouds)
• a full set of images and calibration frames I have submitted for the NASA-based science project called the Eclipse Megamovie

Although the images captured were as good or better than I hoped, post-processing them to fully bring out the available detail is a rather complicated thing involving a variety of software tools. I am still working on that but I wanted to go ahead and share some initial edits. 

The image above is a blend of each of the 19 different shutter speeds used to capture images to submit to the Eclipse Megamovie project. They were taken during totality to capture as much fine detail of the solar corona as possible. The project team will use the calibration frames to pull out even more detail than appears in this image but, for my first pass at this I used some basic stacking techniques in Photoshop. Click on it to see enlarged... isn't the level of detail incredible?

I'm also including some cursory edits I've done of a few other images below including a partial phase image and a picture of Baily's Beads. What I am the most excited about though is the spectacular solar prominences that appear in the Baily's Beads shot. Wow! Even more incredible is that the largest one was visible naked-eye. 

Once I've had time to go through the rest of my images and finish some of the more complicated editing processes, I'll share more of these. I'll also do a follow-up post on my equipment and what went into capturing these images. 

I hope you got a chance to see totality for yourself but, if not, please enjoy my first pass at sharing the view with you. 

Late in the partial phase of the eclipse. Note the sunspot in the center!

  

Baily's Beads and Solar Prominences

Total Lunar Eclipse from Florida Keys

Home from our trip, I finally got a chance to go through the shots I took last Tuesday morning (November 8, 2022) of the total lunar eclipse from my brother- and sister-in- law's house in Islamorada, Florida on Lower Matecumbe Key. This view is looking to the west over Florida Bay.

I shot from about 4:30am EST until about 6:15am EST when morning twilight washed out the eclipsed Moon. I would have started earlier as the eclipse started at 3:03am EST but the view was obscured by the clouds when I went out to shoot, finally clearing about 4:20am EST.

I've shot lunar eclipses where the Moon appeared larger than this but for this project I needed a wide angle view, allowing me to capture individual lunar disks reflecting the changes in the Moon's appearance through each phase of the eclipse. My goal is to create a composite shot with multiple lunar images spaced across a shot like this. The individual lunar disks will run in an arc from near the top of the image, right down between these two palm trees, each lower than the previous as the Moon got closer and closer to the horizon. I used the Stellarium sky app and the PhotoPills planning app with its augmented reality view to plan where to set up for this shot and confirm it would look like I had in mind. 

Creating the composite image is going to take a little work (combining data from about 15 shots taken once every 7 minutes) so stay tuned and I'll post when it is finished.

In the meantime, I was pleased with this image taken near the beginning of morning twilight so thought I'd go ahead and share it now. It's also highlighted on EarthSky.org here.

Enjoy!

Click on image to view full screen.

Equipment Details:

Nikon D750, Nikkor 24-120mm lens at 24mm, Peak travel tripod, camera control with qDSLRDashboard app on Pixel 5, planning with PhotoPills and Stellarium apps on Pixel Slate

Post-processing Details:

Lightroom: minor exposure adjustment, applied lens profile and chromatic aberration adjustment, transform to correct distorted perspective, crop

Photoshop: burning to reduce brightness of dock lights, dodging to slightly increase brightness of moon against twilight sky, use sky mask and a noise filter to reduce color banding when saving to PNG file format