Solar Eclipse 2024 (Begin of totality)

About the Object

Solar Eclipse 8 April 2024

Observation Notes

Probably the astrobinians are already oversaturated with  images from the solar eclipse of 2024-4-8 - but nevertheless, here is my take of this event. Images were taken together with my nephew Christoph. He had a nice tele lens, besides, 4 hands and 4 eyes are better than 2, but we easily could have made use of 8. We started the journey in Denton, TX near Dallas, but as soon as we entered the totality path, skies got cloudy/foggy. Since the traffic was much lighter than anticipated (I spend many many hours in traffic jams in 1999 and 2017), we decided to follow the cloud radar. Still fairly cloudy at noon - at the end we ended up on a hill in Arkansas, going "by sight" the last 30 miles or so. but the effort paid off as we had very clear skies (just a bit of haze - but probably enough to kill attempts to get earth shine) and no one around us so could also listen to the event (ie how the animals reacted). Can't wait for Spain 2026 ...

I had a montage of the event, with the three totality shots also as separate images.  The center one is a stack combine of 7 exposure times from 1/1000 to 1/15. I tried not to "overstructure" the corona, giving it more an impression how I saw it with my naked eyes. remarkable was the bright red light  in the south from one of the prominances! The plot to the left and right are at the begin and end of totality, respectively. 1/1000 s exposures so the prominances are shown best, at the upper left for the begin of totality vs lower right for the end (actually the solar disk is about to break through). Revision B, C and D are these three totality images as separate frame, so one can zoom onto the protuberances. Hope you like it!

Technical Details

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