Solar Eclipse - Part 2

As the moon fully covered the sun, the edges of the sun could be seen since they were no longer lost in the brightness of the sun. This is the most exciting time of the eclipse for the photographer. You no longer need a super-dark filter on your camera and you get to see detail normally reserved for VERY expensive telescopes and special filters. Camera settings had to be adjusted and I glimpsed at the screen on my camera to make sure I was close. I was beyond surprised to see the solar prominence detail. I was even more pleased once I could see the full photo detail on my computer. You can think of the sun as a boiling pot of liquid or maybe a giant volcano where planet-sized bubbles form at the surface, burst, and the remains are pulled back into the sun by its gravity. It's obviously more complicated than that but there are plenty of resources for you to search if you want more. The sun has an 11 year cycle of solar activity (flares, storms, coronal mass ejections) and we happen to be near the peak of one of the cycles. To have the eclipse in our "backyard" during this active period is a huge bonus. You can see several of these solar prominences in these photos. We first get to see the detail on the left side of the sun as the right-to-left motion of the moon just covers the mass of the sun. A few minutes later, the moon reaches the right side of the sun allowing us to see the details on the right side of the sun. The first two photos show the detail of the left side of the sun. The second photo is just a tighter crop of the first photo. The third and fourth photos show the detail on the right side of the sun. We were incredibly fortunate to have a hole in the clouds for both of these photos. There were clouds obscuring any view most of the time between these shots. Heavy clouds dominated the skies after this totality period and I did not take any further photos. It was time to appreciate what we just witnessed. My photos are not unique as I have seen many similar photos taken along the path of the eclipse. It is interesting to see the very similar structures and relative positions of these prominences in other photographs. No matter not being unique, these photos will remain among my all-time favorites.

Thanks,

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