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.

Bonus astronomy blogging

This is M15, one of the many globular clusters of stars hanging around the fringes of our galaxy. It's also one of the objects I got to see last night at the Oregon Observatory. This picture was taken by the Hubble, so what I saw last night through that earthbound 20-inch telescope lacked all of this detail and color. And yet, I was so thrilled to see it I almost lost my balance on the stepladder I was using to reach the eyepiece. There were a lot of Oh, wow's heard as we wandered through the back yard of the observatory, seeing the Andromeda galaxy through one telescope, and then the red supergiant star Mu Cephei through the next one.

We couldn't get a great look at Jupiter -- it was too close to the horizon and obscured by smoke, but saw Saturn quite clearly, tiny and pure white, with Titan winking off to one side, and the shadow of the rings clearly visible. It may have lacked the color and detail of the Cassini images but somehow seeing something with your own eyes, however imperfectly, is better than the best photograph.

Which, of course, is why we're all in Oregon this weekend.

Credit: NASA, ESA

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.