2024 Total Solar Eclipse

A selection of my eclipse photos. Taken from Midlothian, Texas. Nikon D90 300mm zoom telephoto. ASA 200. f/11.

 

A partial phase shot through a cheesy filter (made from the lens of some old eclipse viewing glasses, mounted in a cardboard frame). 1/30 sec. You can see the two sunspot groups that were easily visible on the face of the Sun.

 

Diamond ring just before second contact. 1/1000 sec. This shows the inner corona and solar prominences.

 

1/30 sec exposure showing middle of corona. The reason any eclipse photo has problems looking anything as cool as the naked-eye view is that your eye has a much larger dynamic range than a photograph, so the inner parts of the corona get washed out while the outer tendrils of the corona are too dim to register. One can take a lot of photos covering a range of exposures and then combine them in Photoshop...I did that with a sequence of photos I took of a 1999 eclipse, but it was a lot of effort and I didn't get good exposures of many intermediate times during this eclipse.

 

Below is a 0.6 sec exposure showing outer corona. The ghost image on the left is due to internal reflections in the lens. The corona shape for every eclipse I've seen has been different, and in this one the two spikes off to the left were most noticeable (although the dark rift at the bottom in the photo above was also interesting).

 

Diamond ring after third contact. The largest prominence was visible in the lower right during this half of the eclipse. You can see that we were fighting some clouds that were moving across the face at this time.

 

Last update: 10-Apr-2024