Speaking of Sunriver

Two more landscapes from Eclipse Summer.

Saturday reflections

An appropriately bucolic scene for the end of summer.

This is an overlooked photo from 2017 in Sunriver, Oregon, when I went to see the eclipse. It was hard for mere landscapes to compete with the perhaps once in a lifetime experience of photographing the sun, and I never got around to processing this picture.

Saturday reflections

Summer as reflected in the window of a house in Sunriver.

Sunday bird blogging

Now that the weather is finally catching up to the calendar, here's a look back at summer, with a pretty duck in Sunriver.

I have a meeting with a contractor this afternoon about renovating my kitchen, and my stomach is already in knots remembering the drawn-out painful bathroom debacle of 2016. I just keep whispering to myself, It's worth it in the end. It's worth it in the end.

Sunday deer blogging

I forgot about this until I was going through pictures yesterday. 

The night before the eclipse, there was a wedding party at Sunriver having cocktails on a lawn by the river. This mama deer (the fawn was hiding in the tall grass behind her) stood watching them through the grasses for a few minutes before running away along the riverbank.

Astronomy Tuesday

Last one -- I may do one of those composites of multiple images of the sun shrinking into a sliver, but it's not going to happen any time soon.

Here our mighty star is reduced to its last thin stripe of light before totality.

Astronomy Tuesday

One more picture of totality -- the last picture I took before the diamond ring. You can really see the chromosphere on the right hand side of the sun as the moon starts to slide away.

Random (artsy) things I saw on the Left Coast

A collection of rocks on the beach, vegetable trimmings at a farm, grasses and berries in Oregon, and the dappled light of a sunrise on a tree trunk in Sunriver.

Eclipse flowers

A field of lazy black-eyed Susans in Terrebonne. Their presence was coincidental, obviously, but I smiled at their resemblance to little eclipses.

(Just noticed that I got the name of the flower wrong. We were heading to lunch after the eclipse when I took this picture and I must have had food on the brain.)

Sunday bird blogging

A pine siskin, hiding in the grass in Sunriver.

More Terrebonne, before and after sunrise

Saturday reflections

Early morning -- after breakfast, before eclipse -- at the beautiful ranch in Terrebonne where we spent the day. It was about 3 am when my bus arrived there, and we were stumbling around in the dark with flashlights, so I had no sense of the landscape around us.

Then sunrise, hot coffee -- and this.

Totality

A poor representation, but one that I'm lucky to have at all. During the early stages of the eclipse, when I was shooting through a filter, I had time to fiddle with the shutter times and exposures and get the best possible images. But when totality started, and I took the filter off, I clicked the shutter a couple of times, noticed that I wasn't getting anything, randomly fumbled at the exposure, clicked a couple more times and then forgot about the camera.

Because I didn't care. Up to that point, the eclipse was interesting. Really, really interesting. I looked through my filter and my camera, and saw the sun shrink to a crescent. There were sunspots. It was thrilling.

But when I wasn't staring straight at the eclipse, it didn't have much of an effect until the sun was almost gone. Then the color gradually leaked away from the world around us, and shadows became much sharper and more detailed because the light casting them was coming from a narrower, less diffused, source. Right before totality, it started to get much darker, and much cooler. (Someone had a thermometer, and the temperature dropped almost 15 degrees Fahrenheit.) It became obvious that Something Big was happening.

Then the countdown. 60 seconds to totality. 40 seconds to totality. 20 seconds...10. The first diamond ring flashed in the sky, everyone screamed, then the black lid of the moon snapped into place, and everything that had happened up to that point no longer mattered.

The sky explodes with light, which doesn't make any sense because it's so dark. You can't really see the corona in this photo, but it swims out around the sun in every direction. The stars come out, along with a few planets paying their tribute to the great glory.

I was laughing and crying at the same time. I had binoculars, and I handed them to a woman near me I didn't know and said, “You have to look at this!” just because I had to have someone else see what I was seeing.

And I got a few pictures after all. I was able to jack up the exposure on the raw files, and see totality and the diamond ring. The red on the right hand side is the chromosphere, visible only during eclipses, and the bumps are prominences, tails of gas extending from the surface of the sun.

This diamond ring doesn't shine for me anymore

I really did mean to get back to this sooner, before everyone got tired of eclipse-related news and the national attention span moved on to the next shiny object.

But I only got a couple of hours sleep the night before the eclipse, as we left for our viewing area at 2 am, and I didn't sleep well the night after, so I didn't have the energy to sort through pictures and come up with something both interesting and coherent to say about them.

I wanted to focus more on the experience and less on the photography, knowing that there many much better photographers taking the same pictures I was, but I was pleasantly surprised by the pictures I did manage to get.

This is the second diamond ring effect, at the end of totality, just before our resident astronomer shouted, “Filters up!”

Astronomy Tuesday

You are a child of the universe, 
no less than the trees and the stars; 
you have a right to be here. 
And whether or not it is clear to you, 
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
                              -- Desiderata, Max Ehrmann

Do people still know the Desiderata? Although it was written in the 1920's, I think of it as a product of the Sixties and Seventies, when it frequently appeared on dorm room walls and a spoken word version was an unlikely hit single in the early 1970's.

But I'm thinking of it today for reasons that aren't exactly transcendental. Shortly after the hit record version of the original poem, National Lampoon released a parody version called Deteriorata, which changed the line to “You are a fluke of the universe.”

And yesterday I got to experience one of the happy side effects of what is truly a fluke of the universe: the solar eclipse. Our sun is 400 times bigger than our moon, but it is also 400 times farther away. So, seen from Earth, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size, and it's that coincidence that makes total eclipses possible. If the moon were much closer, it would block out too much of the sun and we wouldn't see the corona; if it were farther away, you'd have only annular eclipses, where the sun isn't entirely blocked. And since the moon is gradually moving farther away from Earth, over the next several million years total eclipses will become increasingly infrequent, and will eventually stop.

I will write much more about the experience over the next several days, but here's one of the photos I took: shortly after First Contact, when the moon first starts to move over the sun. You can see just the smallest indentation at about the 12:30 mark. The dark spots in the center of the sun's disk are sunspots.

Sunday bird blogging

Ducks on the river yesterday morning.

I ended up skipping the welcome dinner and going to bed early, so yesterday morning I took a long walk before breakfast, when the mist was still clinging to the riverbanks, and the empty golf course was miles of fields and gentle hills.

It's lovely here. We had a lecture after breakfast, and after dinner a field trip to the Oregon Observatory where we got to peer at various celestial objects through large telescopes, but most of the day was free. I went for a swim, walked into the village for lunch at a Portuguese cafe, and spent the afternoon mostly reading on a lounge chair under an umbrella. The air smells of summer: tree bark baked in the sun mixed with pine needles and dusty roads and suntan lotion.

Saturday reflections

It's maybe cheating a little to call this a reflection shot, but too bad -- I'm on vacation.

This is the early evening view along the water in Sunriver, Oregon, yesterday evening. The journey here was mercifully hassle-free, except for the getting up at 4:30 in the morning part. The air was thick with wildfire smoke in the afternoon, but did clear, as you can see.

Saturday reflections

From the archives:

This was taken in Portland, a few years ago, and for some reason never processed. I love the red truck.

Saturday reflections

It's not immediately obvious just what is the reflection here, which is why I like these otherwise unremarkable buildings in downtown Portland.

Saturday reflections

This is the window of a store called Art of Persia in Portland. It was closed when I walked by, but these plates caught my eye. I didn't actually see ceramics like this in Iran, but those patterns, and the overlapping petal shapes like a flattened squinch, were immediately familiar. They caught my eye, and now that there's a tentative deal to lift the sanctions and I've been hoping things are going to get better for the many lovely people I met there, my heart.

I couldn't get clear shots of most of the patterns because of the reflections but it makes a pretty abstract.