Skies and Stars

Great American Eclipse

What I cannot capture in this image of the Great American Eclipse of 2017 is the chill in the air when the eclipse reached totality. The birds were chirping like it was sunset, the squirrels were chattering, wolves howled in the distance. There was even this cute little dog that came looking for his owner almost to tell him, ‘Daddy, it is time to go home!’. My friend Chris Jackson is a big guy who is used to cold weather and he put on a jacket as the temperatures dipped. Stars appeared in the sky like the one I captured here. What happened during those two minutes of totality is not something that can be easily described or understood. I was not prepared for what I experienced but I want to experience this again and again if I am lucky enough to do so. What you are looking at is about 36 photographs taken over a 3 hour period from the same spot.

Sun, Moon & Stars

Exactly a year ago today, I witnessed a phenomenon for the first time in my life. Hopefully it won’t be the last. This picture is the essence of that magical moment when the Moon came exactly in position to cover the disc of the sun, thus revealing the corona which we can’t see unless we have a total solar eclipse to block out the Sun. We all know that you can’t see the moon on a new moon day. Except you can see it during totality. We know that stars don’t come out during the day. But they do during totality. Like the 4 star system, Regulus on the bottom middle and I am guessing the binary star system Nu Leonis on the top right of the Sun. We know that we can only see moonshine from the earth and earthshine from the moon but, we can see earthshine illuminating the moon during totality. We know we can’t see solar prominences, with naked eye, but we can see the red/pink coronal loops during totality. I won’t lie to you that I was observing all of these during that very infinitesimally short period of totality at the beautiful Stanley Lake in Idaho. But, all of what I described above was either observed by me or was captured by my camera in a single exposure. This is not a HDR or a composite of several images but it is a single processed image. No special software was used. Also this was was shot on a regular camera with a regular telephoto zoom lens not a telescope. Processed in Capture One Express and Adobe Photoshop Sony alpha a7RII Sony SAL 70-400mm G2 ISO 200, 250mm, 1.6s at f/8

Sun, Moon & Stars

Exactly a year ago today, I witnessed a phenomenon for the first time in my life. Hopefully it won’t be the last. This picture is the essence of that magical moment when the Moon came exactly in position to cover the disc of the sun, thus revealing the corona which we can’t see unless we have a total solar eclipse to block out the Sun. We all know that you can’t see the moon on a new moon day. Except you can see it during totality. We know that stars don’t come out during the day. But they do during totality. Like the 4 star system, Regulus on the bottom middle and I am guessing the binary star system Nu Leonis on the top right of the Sun. We know that we can only see moonshine from the earth and earthshine from the moon but, we can see earthshine illuminating the moon during totality. We know we can’t see solar prominences, with naked eye, but we can see the red/pink coronal loops during totality. I won’t lie to you that I was observing all of these during that very infinitesimally short period of totality at the beautiful Stanley Lake in Idaho. But, all of what I described above was either observed by me or was captured by my camera in a single exposure. This is not a HDR or a composite of several images but it is a single processed image. No special software was used. Also this was was shot on a regular camera with a regular telephoto zoom lens not a telescope. Processed in Capture One Express and Adobe Photoshop Sony alpha a7RII Sony SAL 70-400mm G2 ISO 200, 250mm, 1.6s at f/8