Total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024

I had seen and enjoyed a dozen or so lunar eclipses before 2017, but it wasn’t until the Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017, that I got to understand why people say that it’s impossible to appreciate exactly how amazing a total solar eclipse is until you see one yourself.

Since then, I’ve been eager to see another one. The October 2023 annular eclipse was great fun to watch, but what I’ve really been looking forward to is the second of the pair of early-21st-century eclipses to run across the US. Best of all, this eclipse was predicted to go right over my back yard!

I was more than a little nervous, though, fearing that the weather would not cooperate. Indiana is no stranger to clouds, and the first time I made a special effort to view a solar eclipse in this state ended in failure. The cloud cover was so thick for the October 23, 2014, partial eclipse that not only could I not find the sun using my eclipse glasses, I could not even find it with my own eyes. The sun and moon set before I could see them interacting.

And TimeandDate.com (a great resource for eclipse planning) said that “in the past, this day [April 8] was cloudy 64% of the time (since 2000).” That sounded like worse-than-even odds that the sun would be a no-show for its big day.

Still, the show must go on, so I picked up these very specific potato chips to celebrate what I hoped would be a very special day. And as it turned out, we lucked out!

There were some wispy clouds in the sky, but they did not for a single moment block the sun before, during, or after totality. My phone’s weather app described the skies as “mostly cloudy,” but it was clearly being pessimistic. If I’d have known that the wisps where what it considered “mostly cloudy,” I wouldn’t have worried so much.

They say you should not point your phone’s camera directly at the sun, but I did it anyway, since the phone was doing an extraordinarily bad job of focusing on the single object it could see with the eclipse glass filter between the lens and the sun.

Here, the sun is about 30% covered by the moon, although you can’t really tell from the somewhat formless image of the sun. The phone offers a little hint, though, in the form of an aqua “ghost” image lower in the frame, that’s a mirror image of the eclipsing sun.

(One of these days, if I keep eclipse-chasing, I’m going to need to buy some proper photographic equipment for it.)

In the frame below, you can see a plane to the right that may or may not be carrying passengers looking at totality from their seat in the sky. You can also see another ghost image showing the progressively smaller slice of the sun.

A little closer to totality. I like the way the contrails combine with the lens flare in this frame to produce celestial triangles.

Below you can see the shrinking ghost image tucked right under the neighbor’s satellite dish.

Just a few minutes before totality:

In this frame the ghost image resembles an aqua banana in a hammock.

And now… Totality!

It’s a bit of a cliche to say that pictures can never do an eclipse justice, but when it comes to my iPhone, it’s a massive understatement. Fortunately, I have friends with better equipment and skills who have been kind enough to let me include a couple of their images in this post.

Aside from the sheer awe of seeing that black disc in the sky surrounded by a halo of soft white light, I was quite curious as to why the bottom of it was pink. My friend Karen Stockstill Cahill shared some amazing photographs from Josh Cahill’s filtered telescope, and these included the pink bottoms as well; I am glad that it was not just my imagination.

I do not know why it is pink, but Karen estimates that the prominence is 35,000 to 40,000 meters tall, or 4 to 5 Earth diameters.

Here are another couple of great pictures from that telescope:

It was an amazing eclipse. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

---

April 9 post-script: The morning after the eclipse, the skies looked like this:

My little one pointed to the thick clouds and said, “This is the weather I thought we were going to have yesterday.” So did I! I’m so glad the familiar Indiana cloud cover decided to take a day off instead and let us enjoy the celestial show.