-
Eclipse today
92 miles south to the middle of the 115 mile path. Camera, sunscreen, stylish shades.
Still don’t understand why a solar eclipse would make people loony. Try to come back with some pics.
Anyone else going to see it? It is North America only.
“There is no dark side in the moon really, as a matter of fact, it’s all dark.”
-
44 Replies
-
With my ongoing on/off eye issues I’m not interested in looking at the solar eclipse , in my opinion not worthy of further damaging my eyes, even with protective Eyewear, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee protection, so, therefore , I for one will not be taking part, though I know that it is special as it’s a total solar eclipse , best viewing is along St Lawrence Seaway, Niagara Falls corridor in Ontario, , Quebec ….
However , I did a few yrs back saw the lunar eclipse that was safer on the eyes, than sun one, I still just glanced briefly at lunar one …
Please take care for all who are planning to view it…
🌞☀️🌑😎
-
Jacki,
You’re wise to think of your health first. There will be many pictures of it to see.
It ran through a lot of highly populated areas, and they said there were millions of people who did what we did and drove into the area of the totality.
When I planned our route, as I said above it was 92 miles to Findlay, Ohio, in an 1 hour and 23 minutes, per Google.
When I started in Ann Arbor, 35 miles north of the state line, and drove to pick up my brother, it took me over twice as long as usual – 35 minutes instead of 15. That’s how much the traffic was backed up, that far away, at 10am. We decided en route to shorten the trip, since we were watching high level clouds come in from the southwest. We got off in Maumee south of Toledo, and started looking at weather reports. It took us 2 hours and 15 minutes to get to Maumee, which was 39 miles closer than Findlay, over twice as long again. The radio said the backup just to get onto the highway was half an hour.
-
-
I’m not travelling, but I’ll be conducting a telescopic viewing session from my campus if the clouds hold off. (The maximum eclipse here will be about 80%.) The college even pitched in and bought some eclipse glasses.
-
We got our glasses from our niece. She was going to go, but she would have to take a day, get her two boys out of school, sounded like a lot, so she ended up passing on it.
Still though, the eclipse was in the high 90 %s in Ann Arbor, so that’s a good view.
-
-
Ninety five percent here in Houston. I’ll get the telescope out and take pictures if it clears up, but right now it’s cloudy with a light mist. The closest it looks like there’s a chance to see it (less chance of clouds) is Dallas. That’s probably a 4 hour drive given the number of people that are trying to see the eclipse so it’s a little late to leave now.
For reference, this is a picture I took with the scope of the October 2023 partial here in Houston.
-
Here’s the best I could do today. We only had 94% here but this is right at the maximum. It was too cloudy and rainy here to set up the big ‘scope but the clouds parted just a bit and I managed to grab this with my little travel camera.
-
I live right about on the border where the Detroit suburbs end and the farms begin. 30 years ago, I was on a nice lake 25 miles west of here in that countryside.
I had a big outbuilding down the street, and one thing I was thinking of doing was putting a platform on the back of it to hold a telescope. That place had the best seeing of anywhere I’ve ever lived. And since it was mostly wetlands the neighbors were a bit loud, but they were all animals, so I didn’t mind. Frogs, cranes, grouse, coyotes, owls, Neves, lots of noise makers. It was all good.
But I didn’t last there long enough to ever put the observatory up. Those are really nice pics you took.
-
-
It’s not going to have a huge effect on us up here. If I’m out and about I may have a gander (safely) at the sight but not going to get all hopped up over it. We had a pretty good one in 2017(?) and at work we made up box viewers and used welder’s glass to observe it. Worked quite well actually.
-
Daryl,
When I saw the maps last fall where it was going to be at least a partial, I was like whoa.
Looked like the entire continental US would get at least a taste, and really, from the beautiful Mexican Riviera , up through Texas 🤠, big swath of the Midwest, into Ontario and out to the Maritimes. Hollywood couldn’t have plotted it any better.
The whole southern area of Canada from BC east – where most of you live – got at least a bit of it.
I was glad to finally see a full eclipse for the first, and maybe last, chance I’ll ever have.
I’m thinking today, maybe I’ll go see if someone has calculated how much effect on the US that little bit of shade had. Hopefully it cooled us off enough to offset some of the extra fossil fuels some of the guys like me burned to go see it.
-
The Edmonton Space Sciences Center had a video feed of the eclipse from somewhere in the totality path. One of my friends sent me some video footage of it. It even included a solar flare shooting off into space with the sun’s corona glowing around the moon’s silhouette. Pretty amazing stuff. One of my Goldwing pals took some pretty cool photos from east of Toronto with his D-SLR and posted them on his FB page. It was a broken cloud sky and blocked a lot of the view, but his camera set to B&W captured it beautifully. Their location was about 2/3 to 3/4 totality depending on timing. But our location was far from the view path. We are roughly at the halfway point between Dallas and the North Pole, just to give you an approximation. Or if you draw a line along the latitude west from where James Bay meets the Hudson’s Bay that’s pretty close to our northern geographic. Not that we’re isolated, but yeah, we are in the sticks.
I went outside when I saw the daylight waning (perfectly clear skies) but I couldn’t find my old welding helmet and I really couldn’t see a doggone thing. But the daylight dimmed from bright sunlight to what would be comparable to a high solid overcast. But it had a weird side effect: no wind and literally no sound. No birds singing or dogs barking…total silence. Only other time I’ve experienced that ethereal silence was about two minutes before an F3 tornado wreaked havoc on our local area in 1985. Kind of the same, but thankfully very different. -
Chris,
No calculations here but it does show up on my weather station. Here’s the temperature, dew point, and the solar radiation meter over the same time period (temperature is in Fahrenheit). You’ll have to do eyeball comparisons on the radiation sensor since I didn’t label that screenshot. It was cloudy here but there still seems to be some effect:
-
You have a weather station. Another neat toy. When I was a kid I had a rain gauge. I don’t remember why. It didn’t get a lot of use.
Reminds me of when I was in college and a friend of mine worked at the radio station. She told me when it was time to do the weather report, she’d walk over to the window and have a look outside.
-
-
We were in the 94% area very cool to watch! I heard yesterday that with the earthquake around New York and the eclipse today, that the world was going to end during the eclipse. Gotta love those people.
-
Some people were talking about the rapture being on the schedule yesterday.
If that actually did happen, there must be a lot more non-believers on the planet than I thought, because there sure were plenty of people left out on the roads.
We tried 3 different parks, just looking for a place to put the car, find a picnic table, and have lunch, and they were all full and then some.
-
The rapture people I heard about were saying it was going to happen at the intersection of the 2017 and 2024 eclipses. That would have put it in the southeastern corner of the state of Missouri.
-
Oh, okay. I guess I didn’t have all the details.
I didn’t realize there was a horizontal component to it beforehand.
-
-
My viewing session today was vastly more successful than I had anticipated! Normally the campus is pretty dead in the afternoon, but we had probably over 100 people crawl out of the woodwork to take a look: students, faculty, staff, and even the college president. At the peak there were about 20 people waiting in line to look through the telescope. And no one was disappointed! Skies weren’t perfectly clear, but we lost less than 10 minutes total to passing clouds.
Here’s a slideshow of the session, posted on the school’s Facebook page. I’m the doofus standing to the right of the telescope in most of the photos:
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1385898469006462&set=pcb.1385898512339791
-
Very cool. That’s great you gave people a chance to check it out.
That scope looks about like what I should have.
-
Thanks, Chris. The scope only cost a few hundred dollars. The tradeoff for the large aperture is that it has no computer controls or even a clock drive to track objects as the Earth rotates. You have to keep repositioning it by tilting the tube by hand, so it’s really only good for looking at easy-to-find objects in a wide field of view.
-
-
I just got home, I’ll get to reading and replying in a bit, but first — can’t have a thread in this Club with only one song in it.
Even with looking for songs on the web to find a couple suitable tunes, this one I just remembered. I played more of his tunes on the guitar than anyone else way back then. Teaser and the Firecat and Tea for the Tillerman were the two I liked the best. This from the former.
-
-
I think I need to watch more Q&As from Lisa and Mona on video stuff, since my pictures were not good. I could look at the partial eclipse with the glasses, and see it pretty well, it looked awesome, but if I took a picture of the same thing, I saw the whole circular shape of the sun – like there was no eclipse happening. Somehow the moon got edited out. We did have a thin layer of high altitude cloud cover in the way, which gave us a bit of fuzziness in looking at it, plus there was a circle around it as if there were ice crystals in the clouds reflecting some of the light. I didn’t see that ring with just the glasses though.
I was watching the clock for when it would start, but didn’t really have to. We were in lawn chairs, with phone cams and glasses, and then saw a darkness in the clouds, and on the ground, coming our way. Then it was over us, and the parking lot lights came on, and the whole area got dark. And it seemed to get maybe 10 degrees colder. Between that effect and the time, we knew we were in the totality. I don’t think I’ll ever forget how it looked then, with that corona shining out around it. No wonder our ancestors thought they were in for it when that happened.
Very cool. But it’s been a long day. 😎
-
Funny you bring that up Chris, I was looking through a #9 welding lens and watched the whole eclipse. I then took three pictures through the same lens, I got the same results you did, a perfect image of the sun and the moon missing. Anyone have a reason for this oddity?
-
Forgot to mention, not a cloud in the sky here.
-
The moon is “missing” because the camera overexposed the image. If you used your phone, it most likely used some form of averaging for the exposure and the the sliver of sun was so bright it washed over the image of the moon. On an iPhone if you bring up the camera and tap on the main subject (or whatever you want as the main subject), you’ll see a square come up. The camera will then use only that part of the image for the exposure and focus. I’m not sure about Android phones but I’d assume they have a similar feature.
-
Thanks Jim. Yesterday I saw a piece about 10 tips for taking the best eclipse pics. And what you’re saying was on there. I remember the part about telling the camera where to set focus on an iPhone. And what you’re saying about it being overexposed makes sense too.
I tried taking a picture through the eclipse glasses, and that actually did work better. You could see that it was an eclipse.
The wildest part of the day from a tech standpoint, that I don’t have a good theory for yet, was that when I looked through the glasses with my right eye, I saw 3 images, like there were 3 eclipses going on. Didn’t matter which of the two lenses I looked through with that eye. My left eye only saw one eclipse. So I don’t think it was the glasses. lol. And my right eye is my better eye. Good thing I can drive by sense of touch. I might mention that to my eye doctor…
I’ve thought more than once about getting a real camera and spending time to learn how to use it, but hasn’t been a priority.
-
Thanks for the info Chris, I am by no means a photographer, but that makes total sense. Because the pictures didn’t turn out I deleted them from my phone.
-
-
Chris, I posted the same quote to someone today: “There is no dark side in the moon really, as a matter of fact, it’s all dark.”
It was cloudy here today, so not much to see. It did darken up for a while, kinda like it was about to rain.
And everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
JP
-
Well, Idk. The way I operate a phone cam, I seem to mess it up so “it’s all white”, not dark, after all, like Jim was helping me with.
I read the directions, then ignored them.
I asked Google for a list of songs about eclipses, and got very little. Then I used a trick I’ve used before. I went to genius.com, the lyrics site, and searched there for “eclipse”. Better results.
Pink Floyd is the right answer to a lot of questions.
-
-
Hi Chris, It was cloudy and raining most of the day here in Western Wisconsin. It did get noticeably dark for 30 minutes or so. By the time the sun came out this afternoon the eclipse had already passed. Beautiful evening though. My nephew took his wife and two kids to Indianapolis to catch it. He sent me a few pictures, pretty cool.
-
I can even add a video, well a song with an album cover picture, but a great song though and it kind of fits the theme of the forum.
-
I’m a keyboard player. I know Dream Weaver very well. I remember it’s all keyboards, drum and vocals.
A very clever bit of conjuring that sound with the gear available that long ago. Organ, Arp String Ensemble, analog synth, I’m not sure what all is in there.
-
Very cool pics. That one on the left looks a lot like what I will remember from this experience.
In the middle of the totality, I took a peak at it without the glasses. Pretty awesome.
So that’s what it looks like when a dragon eats the sun.
-
I think you are o.k. as long as you don’t stare at it. I remember seeing one when I was in grade school and we were told not to look at it with the naked eye but a few of us rebels snuck a peak. I have seen a few eclipses, both lunar and solar, I think that means I am old. They are really a cool phenomenon to experience, kind of eerie.
-
I remember one song with “eclipse” in the title. Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart. I haven’t heard any of her songs in a while. I always liked her voice and delivery. What better time to play this song.
-
-
This song is not actually about eclipses, but the first few words describe the effects of one:
-
It always surprises me that I can see the title to a song and wonder what it is, but when I hear it playing I think – oh THAT song. I always liked that song and haven’t heard it in a long time. Lively and a great vocal on it.
-
-
I saw it but I’ve seen a number of them in my almost 66 years. I’ve been an astronomy nut since I was a kid. I didn’t take my scopes out though yesterday, I just held the solar filter up to my face.
They are always a treat to see. Tons of great photos and videos on the net to look at. Here is a shot I took through my 4″ Meade 2045 in 2017:
-
I gave my 2045 to my grandkids last year. I still have a 2080 and a full aperture solar filter for it. That’s what took the photo I posted from 2017. If you’ve also got a 2080 I’ve got a deal for you. I have the mount to put the 2045 on top of the 2080. If you don’t have one and want it, it’s yours for whatever it costs to ship. PM me if you’re interested.
-
Thanks Jim but no I don’t have a 2080. I bought a Celestron 5 but haven’t used it much in a few years. I used the 2045 to do Sunspot counts for the AAVSO for 8 years. I bought it in 1986 during Halley’s comet’s last visit.
-
-
Chris, for future reference you may or may not know of the Lake Hudson State Rec Area in Lenawee County. It contains a <Michigan-designated Dark Sky Preserve>. This is not one of the Internationals, like The Headlands, which have very strict criteria. My son has been there and says yes, it is quite dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Hudson_State_Recreation_Area
en.wikipedia.org
Lake Hudson State Recreation Area - Wikipedia
Lake Hudson State Recreation Area - Wikipedia
-
Thanks Pete,
I actually did know about that park, and that it’s a designated dark sky park, or whatever they call it. We actually talked about it here in the Club a bit last year. It’s the only dark sky park in Michigan that’s not on a Great Lake, iirc, which is probably what you meant by having different criteria.
I’ve never been to that park, but I had been wondering how it could possibly be completely dark, given its inland location.
-
Chris, it seems there are a number of different Dark Sky designations both on the International and on the local levels. So Mich has three Internationals: the Headlands, one in the Keweenaw and a third ‘somewhere else’ and there’s maybe six of the state-designated areas, including the one in Lenawee County. I started looking into the various criteria which are an interesting read, but as often I soon forgot what I was looking for. In general, the more one can see at night due to lesser amounts of light pollution, the better and thus higher ranking. Wikipedia says something called the ‘Bortle Scale’ is used to designate places from 1 to 9, with ‘1’ being the absolute darkest. (I always thought ‘Bortle was the sound my kitchen sink makes at the very end of draining). 9 is a typical urban core and 1 is darkness which has to be witnessed to be believed. Mid-ocean is a good spot as are some of the big provincial parks in far far northern Canada. The descriptions of #s 1 and 2 are worth the read and will cause you start making travel plans to see things never seen before. That spot in Southern Mich has nothing very much around it in all directions and so the light levels are pretty low and viewing is good. Well, don’t mean to go on so!
-
Thanks Pete,
Michigan has just one Bortle 1 site, at Muskellunge Lake State Park in the Upper Peninsula, on the shore of Lake Superior, east of Grand Marais. The rest of them seem to be rated 2.
https://www.go-astronomy.com/dark-sky-parks-stargazing-state.php?State=MI
-
Log in to reply.