Watsisname, I love your description. I wish I will have the opportunity to see a total eclipse during my lifetime.

Rough HDR composite of the solar corona!

How do you make your HDR composite?  I have two exposures, scaled and rotated to match, and I found a description on how to do it in gimp, but it was a quite manual process more aimed at fixing a dark landscape and a bright sky.

What was the focal length used?

250mm, of course.

I've been hearing lots of reports about people crying and being overwhelmed with emotions during totality.

I was a bit surprised by how little the totality affected me emotionally. It was cool and all, but... I don't know, I guess since I knew every little detail of what to expect (and it actually fell somewhat short of expectations) I wasn't overwhelmed by it. I certainly thought it was cool, though. The best part of totality for me was getting to photograph it. I'm thrilled with having been able to apply my hobby to such a wonderous event, and am very happy with the pictures I got.

Surprisingly, it was the late stages of partial eclipse that I enjoyed the most. The dim sunlight, like standing on an alien world, the shadows being sharper in one direction than another, the impression of the moon obscuring the sun if you happened to glance at it... it was an amazing experience.

I suspect that I would be much more emotionally moved by a strong auroral display. There's little that can prepare you for that.

Speaking of aurora, did you know there was a fantastic aurora display that night?  Looks like the eclipse coincided with a solar storm (you can see prominences in some of the eclipse pictures.)
I was perplexed by the emotions myself because I thought that it would be just like any other day when day turns to twilight, but having it happen in the middle of the day must do something psychologically.  I can understand why people feared eclipses so much in the historical past.

A-L-E-X, yeah it was, saw the transit of Venus in 2012 and glad I didn't miss that.  Already started making plans for 2024, finding areas, will keep track of that as the years pass.

Come up this way if you can, I am just hoping the weather will cooperate in early April in upstate NY

I just checked my DSLR images.  Again, getting the focus right for the 1000mm is hard, in particular with the 1.6 converter (effectively 2400mm given the sensor size).  And the vibration of the mirror flipping adds fuzziness. But I think I got the exposure perfect for catching the inner corona, despite having set it manually and I did no bracketing, just one exposure setting for all shots.  Below is the best totality shot.  Given that I have an aging Nikon D70 camera, I'm satisfied, only regretting the focus which I never get perfect.  If I can figure how to do it, I'll combine it with the videocamera image to get an HDR exposure.

The lens was a 1000mm F/11 reflex.  No teleconverter, but a 1.5 crop factor.
dark.jpg

You captured the solar prominences on the right side of the sun!  There was a powerful aurora display that night.

Just loaded in the video from the GoPro.  As expected the video quality isn't too good (very grainy) during totality, and I'd set it at ISO1600.  But besides the grain it did a good job capturing the changing light and shadow movement.  I'll see what to do for the video but for now here's a screenshot just as the Sun vanished.



Really impressed with your photos, HarbingerDawn and DoctorOfSpace!  Captured great detail.

I love the gradients!  Is that the 360 degree sunset ?

Come up this way if you can

If I still live in the area I am now I will most likely go south to Ohio

Come up this way if you can

If I still live in the area I am now I will most likely go south to Ohio

It's no use worrying this far out, but April 8th has me concerned because climatology favors clouds that time of year.

Neil deGrasse Tyson certainly means well and tries hard, but he's not the ambassador of space sciences that Carl Sagan was.

-Alex

Totally agree.

Rough HDR composite of the solar corona!

How do you make your HDR composite?  I have two exposures, scaled and rotated to match, and I found a description on how to do it in gimp, but it was a quite manual process more aimed at fixing a dark landscape and a bright sky.

GIMP, using layer masks. Put both exposures into GIMP as layers, and put the darker exposure on top. Right-click on that layer (in the layer list tab) and choose "Add layer mask", then select "Grayscale copy of layer". You may have to play with the levels of both the mask and the top layer itself to get the best result.

Now that I'm home, I went back and tried to improve the HDR composite. Still not perfect, but better than it was.

Thanks.  That looks very good.  I tried to use the enfuse command which figures out possibly everything itself, with some success, but it's apparent that the two exposures are too far apart. I need to try what you did in Gimp, which likely leaves me more control.  But first I think I should make a composite of my long exposure from the video camera.  I couldn't keep the camera still, so it sweeps over a larger part of the corona, so I should be able to combine everything in a wider view and perhaps reduce the noise.  I have recorded about 20 seconds of totality, or 600 frames at 3840x2160 resolution, so surely it must be possible to get something better than what a random picture from that sequence gives me.  I let Hugin have a quick go at it, but it messed up.

I've checked my GoPro Hero3 cam now, and the video is pretty bad.  The light sensitivity is very bad and I got extreme noise during totality.  I should have tested this camera beforehand and checked if there are settings.  Temporal denoising should help, though.

I remember the corona was more evenly distributed in 1999, I like this one better

A composite of four exposures (all using the same settings) showing how the sky darkened as the eclipse progressed.