20
votes
Any amatuer (or professional) astrophotographers capture the annular solar eclipse today?
I was only able to see ~70% coverage in my area, and was hoping to see some posts here on Tildes about the eclipse. I'd love to see anyone's work they managed to capture today.
here's the best pic I got with my phone: https://i.imgur.com/YI2wv11.jpg
it was cloudy in Winnemucca, and during the peak of annularity it was actually dim enough that I was able to take that on my phone without having a solar filter attached.
when I get home tomorrow I'm going to unload the memory card of my Real Camera (which had a solar filter) and sort through the pictures on it.
For a phone pic that is fantastic.
It was way too foggy and cloudy here to see anything except just a dimming of the sky. However, I did decide to do something fun to still commemorate it. I'm currently making a large wizard staff, carved from wood with a large amethyst stone set at its tip. I decided to set the large amethyst crystal into the staff today. It's epoxied in place, and I managed to time things right so I could set the stone right during the peak of annularity. So I can dramatically tell people, "this staff was forged beneath the light of a ring of fire eclipse!!"
I love this, enjoy the work of your hands!
Very off topic, but why are there so many solar eclipses visible from the Americas? I feel like I have read about at least 2 in the past year, and yet in Europe I never hear about eclipses being visible.
I'd wager a big part of it is size -- the Americas are way bigger than Europe. North America alone is about 2.5 times the size of Europe.
If you're looking out for future ones, there'll be a partial solar eclipse visible in Europe in March 2025 and a total solar eclipse visible in Iceland and Spain in April 2026.
holy shit
I know where I'm gonna be in August 2026. anyone interested in a Tildes meetup in Reykjavik?
If I get the job I'm gunning for and have some travelling cash by then, I totally would.
I’m not an astronomer but I’d expect that it’s just chance. You can poke around the different maps linked here and see that there’s nothing special about North America, and a lot of the eclipse paths are over the Pacific Ocean as you’d expect given that it takes up like half the earths surface. I don’t know if latitude could play into it since the earth is tilted… maybe some latitudes are more likely to see an eclipse than others?
Some cool info in this pdf from NASA:
https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/5MCSE/5MCSE-Text11.pdf
Eclipse frequency is cyclical with about a 600 year period and we happen to be in an eclipse-poor part of that cycle. I didn’t see anything about the geographic distribution - the analysis was focused on eclipse type and temporal variability.
It's about to get rare. Total Eclipse in 2017. Annular in 2023. Total in 2024. Annular in 2044. Total in 2046. This is North American, US specific, but it is far less common than the last few years might suggest. Plan for the 2024 of you want to experience it. I saw the 2017 on the west coast, Annular yesterday in Texas, and will probably be back for 2024. Completely worth it and both are different experiences.
On the other hand, Spain is going to get two back-to-back total eclipses less than a year apart in August 2026 and 2027 -- the first time Spain gets a total solar eclipse since 1905! And the first total solar eclipse in continental Europe since 2006. 2026 is definitely the year for Europeans to catch them though, since the 2027 one is mostly further south and after that there aren't many total solar eclipses in our area for a while either.
FYI, a ton of eclipses just go over the oceans. There's nothing special about any area in particular. The Earth rotation and Moon's revolution are not strongly linked in a tidal pattern, so it's practically random where an eclipse will fall.
I'm still working through the ~200 GB of photos, but you might like these I took last Saturday in Albuquerque, NM.