The Great American Eclipse of 2024

We almost didn't see it. This total lunar eclipse cut a long path across the United States, from Texas to the New England states. Northeastern Pennsylvania was outside the path of totality, but still in an area of greater than 90% coverage - 94.4% in Nanticoke. Unfortunately, that was also pretty much our degree of cloud coverage this afternoon, after a bright and sunny morning. Still, there were moments that the eclipsed sun could be seen through the clouds, as captured above at about 3:15 PM.

I tried to get establishing shots of the sky and landscape before the maximum eclipse so I could compare it to the appearance at maximum. Unfortunately, the adaptability of my camera to various light levels meant that no significant difference can be seen in the before (above) and after (below) images. But there was a significant difference. The "after" appearance was much gloomier, and felt unnatural. The clouds seemed to thicken, making me wonder if the temperature drop in the Moon's shadow causes water vapor to condense out of the atmosphere, increasing cloud formation. It was easy to feel the temperature drop as well.

I had friends at various points along the path of totality. One traveled to San Antonio, Texas especially to see the eclipse. It looked like she and her companions would be clouded out, but the sky cleared long enough to see totality, and the solar corona. (A few hours later it was raining hard enough that her hotel began to take on water.) Another friend in Niagara Falls had cloud cover comparable to ours, but at least got to experience totality by having the mid-afternoon clouded-over sky turn completely black.

While somewhat disappointing, this was a fun event, and I'm glad I got to experience it. 

CODA: While reviewing past eclipse posts, I found this diagram of the path of today's eclipse, created by Fred Espenak. I originally posted it in December 2018.

Two eclipses in Spring 2021

Eclipses have seasons, and travel in groups of two or three. The seasons are complicated and are dictated by the way the orbits of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth interact. In 2021 there were two eclipses in the Spring (total lunar on May 26, annular solar on June 10) and there will be two more in late Autumn (near-total lunar on November 19, and a total solar on December 4.) I was lucky enough to be in a position to view both of the Spring eclipses. 

Unfortunately for me, both of these eclipses were visible in Nanticoke at or around sunrise - and I work the late shift. 

On May 26 I forgot about the eclipse completely. Only the very earliest stages would be visible to me, and only at sunrise, as the Moon slipped beneath the Western horizon. Still, I stayed up all night for unknown reasons, and became aware almost by accident that the Moon was glowing bright red in the front window. I quickly grabbed my camera and tripod and snapped off a few photos of the rapidly-setting Moon through the curtains, through the window, and between the houses across the street.

The June 10 eclipse was different. I made plans to view it. I chose my viewing spot: the eastern high school parking lot, overlooking the Little League field - which would have been an ideal spot to observe Comet NEOWISE last July, I realized a few days after the fact. I woke up at 4:45 AM, about three and a half hours after I had fallen asleep, drove the half-mile to the high school, parked the car, and set up a few minutes before the 5:29 AM sunrise.

The minutes dragged on. Sunrise time came and went, and all that happened was that the horizon - the mountains that frame the Wyoming Valley - got a bit brighter. As a sun pillar formed, I realized the Sun was about to rise behind a copse of trees, and I would miss the rising eclipsed Sun at its dimmest and most photogenic. I grabbed my camera and tripod and ran thirty feet to the right, where the Sun would be clear of the trees.

The camera tried to adjust the exposure to balance the brightness, making the rising Sun difficult to see. I was shocked to see the sun rising as a shining crescent. I had expected a much smaller bite to be taken out of it, but I had also heard that it would be 75% covered for Northeastern Pennsylvania. I wondered what someone who had managed to miss the news of the eclipse might think if they accidentally caught a glimpse of the glowing scimitar on the horizon. 

It was possible to observe the rising Sun, filtered through hundreds of miles of atmosphere, without risk of eye damage - but only briefly. After less than a minute the Sun was painful to even glance at, and I was worried the intense light would damage my camera. I packed up my camera and tripod and headed home.

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Just months after COVID-19 vaccines became widely available in the United States, infection rates have plummeted to numbers not seen since March 2020, and death rates have slowed to nearly flatten the cumulative death curve. Eligibility is expanding to younger and younger age groups. Still, it is looking like the country may fail to achieve President Biden's goal of 70% of the population having received at least one shot by July 4, thanks to a small but dedicated group of people who claim that the vaccine is worse than the disease. These people will continue to serve as a reservoir  for COVID-19, breeding variants, waiting to infect those who cannot take the vaccine for legitimate reasons of health, waiting to infect those who are vaccinated but who have only 95% protection against COVID-19.

Meanwhile, in India, new cases of COVID-19 are down significantly since mid-May, but cumulative deaths have nearly doubled since mid-April.

The United States is poised on the brink of a return to normalcy, following nations like New Zealand who have been there for months. Will the rest of the world be heading the same way? 

Total lunar eclipse, January 20 - 21, 2019

The SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON! I'll be adding photos as I get them.

Here's the first, a few minutes after the start of the partial eclipse:

10:34 PM

10:53 PM

11:13 PM

11:36 PM

11:58 PM

12:20 AM

Super Blood Wolf Moon

Sunday, January 20 will mark the second anniversary of the start of the Trump occupation of the White House - which, thanks to the historically tacky banquet served there earlier this week, will have a lingering stench of Big Macs and Filets-O-Fish for years to come.

Coincidentally, that evening everyone in the United States (and all of the Americas, as well as Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, England, Norway, and other parts of Europe and Africa) will have an opportunity to see a total lunar eclipse. (See here for details and timings.) Like all lunar eclipses, it takes place during a Full Moon, and like all Full Moons, this one bears a special name bequeathed upon it by folk tradition - the "Full Wolf Moon." Because it is happening at a time when the Moon is close to its closest approach to Earth in its monthly orbit, it will appear larger than most Full Moons - hence the unofficial designation as a "Super Moon." And because it is a total lunar eclipse, the Moon will move through the central part of the Earth's shadow, vanishing more and more into darkness, until, at the point of totality, it will be bathed the light of every sunrise and sunset taking place during the eclipse, causing it to brighten into a color that can range from rosy pink to brick red to deep purple - though in the popular imagination (and sometimes in reality) it takes on the color of blood, which is why total lunar eclipses are sometimes called "Blood Moons." Put them all together and you get a Super Wolf Blood Moon.

Which sounds pretty damned ominous for someone.

Space.com: Super Blood Moon Lunar Eclipse of January 2019: Complete Guide

NPR.com: Heads-Up For Sunday, A Super 'Blood Moon' Is On The Way

National Geographic: How to see the last 'blood moon' eclipse of the decade

Dial-A-Moon 2019

I wrote about NASA's Dial-A-Moon a while back. It's a very useful site for knowing the phase of the Moon at any hour of any day. The site is only set to cover a single calendar year, and a new version is released every year. I knew that the waning crescent Moon had vanished in the morning sky a few days ago, and wanted to see if I might have a chance of seeing a thin sliver of the very young Moon in this evening's clear sky. I peeked out the front door and saw nothing. So I went to the site - the new, 2019 Dial-A-Moon site - and saw this:

...the hell? Has the Trump Shutdown (the third one of his time of occupying the White House, and the third one that he entered into with Republican control of Congress) extended even here? Will there be no Dial-A-Moon as long as Trump continues to hold the Federal government hostage over his wall fetish?

No. I just happened to hit the site when the Moon was at 0.0% illumination. New Moon = "no Moon." Some parts of the world actually experienced a partial solar eclipse today, the first of the new year. And because of the way these things work, this will be followed by a lunar eclipse in just over two weeks, the evening of January 20 and morning of January 21. This will be a total lunar eclipse, and will be visible from all of North and South America. I hope I can get pictures like I did in September 2015!

For the record: Christmas fish and the 2024 Eclipse

Every year around this time, my mom starts trying to remember how much fish she ordered for the previous year's Vigil Supper - a Polish tradition of a meatless feast on the evening of Christmas Eve, the start of which is signaled by the sighting of the first star in the sky. (Or planet, particularly when Venus shines bright in the Western sky after sunset.) It's a feast filled with wonderful traditions, including the ceremonial breaking and sharing of special blessed wafers called oplatki (pronounced oh-PWOT-key), which look like thin, embossed sheets of styrofoam and taste like the casings of U.F.O. (or Satellite, or Flying Saucer) candies. Some of the traditions have fallen by the wayside - the herring, the fish soup, the extra space left at the table for the stranger-who-might-be-Jesus who might show up at the door, the singing of Polish Christmas carols - but the feast still retains some of the traditional aspects, including fish (usually cod) and pierogies (potato, farmer's cheese, and cabbage. Our old fish source used to be bar / restaurant / catering service called The Alden Manor on Middle Road in Nanticoke. (Mostly. I remember one year we couldn't get it and had to fall back on Arthur Treacher's. That was probably some twenty years ago.) Unfortunately, The Alden Manor went out of business a few years ago, and since that time we have had to find other fish suppliers. Our primary source of late has been Gerrity's, a local supermarket chain.

Anyway: for the record, in 2017, our fish order was forty-five pieces, approximately eight pounds. The exact amount may vary from year to year, depending on how many people will be at the Vigil Supper, and whether leftovers are desired.

*     *     *     *     *

I was reminded today that there is a total solar eclipse that will take place throughout North America in the near future. There was some excited talk about this during the eclipse of 2017, but things have changed quite a bit since then. The eclipse will take place on April 8, 2024, and be visible along a diagonal swath of the eastern half of the United States.

Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak, NASA/GSFC Emeritus. Go here and here for more information.

Assuming I am still in Northeastern Pennsylvania in five years and five months, the closest location along the path of totality will be in the Buffalo / Niagara Falls area. It looks like totality will happen there around 19:25 UTC. Assuming Daylight Saving Time is in effect,this should be 15:25 EDT, or 3:25 in the afternoon - I expect the exact times will be published as the event draws nearer. A friend made a striking video of the eclipse of 2017, not by aiming her camera at the eclipsed Sun, which is tricky at best and dangerous at worst, but by capturing the surrounding landscape as the shadow bands rolled in and out. I have never actually witnessed a total solar eclipse from along the path of totality. Will I have such an opportunity on Monday, April 8, 2024?

SIDE NOTE: When trying to get more information about this event from a site belonging to the U.S. Navy, I am confronted with this message:

Has the U.S. Navy allowed its certificates to expire?

Total lunar eclipse, September 27, 2015

September 27, 2015 was the night of the last of a series of four consecutive total lunar eclipses - and the last total lunar eclipse for several years.  While I was able to get some images of the last total lunar eclipse visible from Nanticoke, at that time I was still figuring out some of the most useful features of my camera. I was also operating under a time constraint (had to wake up very early, would have to pack things up early to get to work) and in a limited space (the Nanticoke-West Nanticoke bridge) in chilly conditions as the sun was rising.

None of that applied here. Sunday was the last day of my work week, so I technically was free the next day. (Except for Jury Duty, for which I would have to be out of the house earlier than usual.) The eclipse would take place in the evening over Nanticoke, late enough to be dark but not too late. And it would be visible from my back yard - in theory, anyway. The WNEP meteorologists were giving us a 40% chance of clear skies. I decided I would be happy with broken cloud cover.

I got to see everything.

All pictures taken with a Nikon Coolpix p520 mounted on a tripod. Camera set to automatic mode with focus at infinity. Magnification is maximum 42x for all but the last image. All photos were done using a 2 or 10 second self-timer delay to minimize shutter bounce. All pictures are raw and unprocessed except for size.

9:03 PM. While the umbral phase of the eclipse was supposed to start at 9:07 PM , there seems to be a good deal of umbral shadow already on the left side of the Moon. 

So, funny story: I base all my timings on what the clock on my camera says. I mean, if a $7.88 watch from Walmart set to atomic clock time can be trusted to keep one-second accuracy for weeks or months, then surely the built-in clock on a relatively expensive camera...no. Turns out my camera clock was running four minutes fast. Which would explain why some of the images I got weren't exactly what I expected: I was four minutes too early.

9:06 PM. Umbral darkening obvious. Remember, this shadow is being cast obliquely along the edge of the Moon. 

The picture above should have been just before the umbra (the dark center portion of the shadow of the Earth) began to cover the left side of the Moon. Instead, it seems like the umbra reached out a bit further than expected. Extra-cloudy conditions in the upper atmosphere, perhaps?

9:20 PM. The curvature of the Earth's umbra is obvious now.

9:39 PM. Umbral shadow nearly halfway across the Moon.

9:54 PM. Umbral shadow most of the way across the Moon.

10:17. A few minutes before totality. Note the stars around the Moon. 

So I was wondering why, at totality (10:20 PM), a very bright edge of the Moon still seemed obvious. Turns out it was because totality was still three minutes in the future!

10:36 PM. Nine minutes into totality.

OK, now that's a totally eclipsed Moon!

10:50 PM. Three minutes past "maximum eclipse," the midpoint of totality, but exactly the published time of the Full Moon!

The midpoint of totality was scheduled for 10:47 PM, while the moment of "Full Moon" was calculated as 10:50 PM.

10:51 PM. Zoomed out to show the stars around the Moon. At totality the Moon hangs in the sky like a fading ember against a starry background.

***********************************************

As 11:00 PM rolled around I decided to call it a night. My alarm would be going off in a few hours and I would be off to my first day of Jury Duty. I posted some raw images to Facebook directly from my memory chip, looked at what other folks were posting, cleaned up the mess I had made with food and drinks while I kept yo-yo-ing between taking photos and posting photos. I shut everything down, put away my tripod and camera, and closed up my Chromebook.

I stepped outside to get one last look. Eyes-only, no camera.

A bright line was showing along the lower left of the Moon. The umbra was sliding away. No, that's not right. The Moon was continuing its journey in orbit around the Earth, and was sliding past the umbra.

Whatever frame of reference you use, the last total lunar eclipse of this series was over. Time for bed.

An account of the Lunar eclipse of October 8, 2014 and the sunrise that followed

I was going to post this on my Lunar photography blog, Shoot the Moon, but then I decided it would be more appropriate to post it here and link to it from there.

I woke up extra-early on the morning of October 8, 2014. The weather forecast had not been promising the night before, and clouds had been thundering across the face of he Full Moon when I went to sleep a few hours earlier. Still, I dragged myself out of bed, took a shower, made coffee, ate some breakfast, and took a peek outside to see if I could see anything. A red glow in the West suggested that if nothing else, I might get some interesting cloud photographs. I made my lunch, gathered up my gear, walked down to the car, and headed for the Nanticoke-West Nanticoke bridge, where I would have a pretty good view of the Western sky - and maybe the eclipsed Moon.

Threading my way through the pre-dawn traffic in Nanticoke, including taking a detour caused by an ambulance parked outside of the local senior high-rise, I caught occasional glimpses of the Moon. The first seemed shrouded in clouds, but those that followed appeared to be clearer. I parked in the semi-paved lot on the Naticoke side of the bridge, grabbed my coat, a hat, my tripod, and a camera, and walked out until I was over the Susquehanna river.

6:26 AM: The Moon was there! Clouds darted around it, but I could see it.

6:31 AM: My camera was having a hard time focusing on a low-light target at infinity. I played with the settings a bit and realized that the standard Landscape mode would work best in this situation - but only once the eclipse had reached totality. Before then, everything was an unfocused blur. After totality, the Moon brightens up a bit, usually. (There was one that I remember from sometime in the late 1980's when the Moon actually became a dark purplish shade, and hung in the sky like a burned-out cinder. Through binoculars it looked ridiculously three-dimensional, like it was a ball hanging just out of reach.) Clouds were still present, but I decided they added a nice touch.

6:32 AM: I was on the walkway of the bridge, which is several feet wide and separated from the automobile traffic by a thigh-high guardrail. I had my tripod positioned so two of the three legs were touching the guardrail. Even in the hour preceding sunrise there was still quite a bit of traffic on the bridge. In this image, a car drove by just as the shutter opened. The reflected sodium vapor lights on the bridge created an eclipse-colored blur.

6:32 AM.

6:32 AM.

6:34 AM: I tried to establish context for these photos by pulling back to include the nearby disused railroad bridge. The camera did not take kindly to the change of state and lost focus.

The clouds settled in for a bit. I took a few more shots and got some fuzzy images. After a few minutes I heard and felt someone approaching on the bridge from the Nanticoke side. I was wearing a black longcoat but had made sure I was wearing relatively light-colored jeans and a beige baseball cap for contrast and increased visibility. I moved against the guardrail, pressed my tripod against it, and eyed the stranger warily: A stocky redbearded fellow, mid-30's, appeared somewhat unkempt. Could be some homeless guy, could be someone out for a morning constitutional. Could be someone who would want to steal my $400 camera and $30 tripod and sell them for enough money to get his next fix and maybe the one after that. 

"Morning," he said.

"Morning," I grunted back.

He walked past silently, then stopped and looked at my setup. "Whatchu lookin' at?" he asked, looking at the Western horizon.

"The Moon," I said. "Lunar eclipse. Snedeker's been going on about it all week." Joe Snedeker is a local meteorologist whose TV forecasts involve more clowning than actual weather information. But he had actually been talking extensively about the eclipse for most of the last week.

"I don't see it," the stranger said.

"It's - " I looked towards the horizon and the Moon was mostly hidden by clouds. "Aw, heck," I said, and hit the playback button on the camera. I had to go back a bit to find a decent photo. "Here," I said.

"Huh. That's pretty neat," the stranger said. "Well, have a nice day." He resumed his walk across the bridge.

6:43 AM: Nine minutes after the last shot the clouds cleared out for a while. The Moon was now much lower but the context was much easier to capture. Many outlets had been referring to this dramatically as a "Blood Moon" - apparently, that's another term for a total lunar eclipse. Despite the hype, I found this one had a rose-pink hue.

6:44 AM: I zoomed in a bit to capture the Moon as it sank closer to the treetops.

6:46 AM: The "Moon Illusion" in a photo. I pushed my zoom all the way to capture the dawn-faded and mist-shaded eclipsed Moon full size, and then I decided that wasn't a very interesting image. I backed off a bit and dipped the camera to include the trees. Reviewing this picture later I thought "My God, the Moon is HUGE there." It's not. I routinely take pictures of the Moon that fill much more of the image. But in this one you are clearly seeing foreground objects - trees that are less than half a mile away - and you're looking at the Moon in terms of them. Trees are big; the Moon is bigger than trees!

6:46 AM: Clearly, the end was near. The Moon was still well above the horizon, but about to pass below a local obstruction that would block it from view. Fun fact: by this point the Moon might have been much lower on the horizon, but its image was refracted up by the atmosphere. This can - and did - result in a condition called a selenelion, a situation where the setting Full Moon and the rising Sun are 180 degrees apart but both appear in the sky at the same time, due to both of their images being refracted above the horizon.

6:47 AM: Going...

6:47 AM: ...going...

6:48 AM: ...going...

6:48 AM: ...going...

6:48 AM: ...going...

6:48 AM: ...OK, we're gonna call it "gone" and move along.

So that was the end of the eclipse for me. Well, I thought I was seeing a bizarre atmospheric effect as the Moon began to peek up over the treetops again, much larger than it had been before. But this turned out to just be a cloud.

And there I was, with a tripod and a camera on a bridge over a river, on a crisp Autumn morning with the Sun rising in the east and some time to kill before I had to head to work. So I hiked out farther onto the bridge to get a better look at the Eastern sky.

I saw this:

6:50 AM: These beams are crepuscular rays - think of them as anti-sunbeams, shadows cast by clouds on the water vapor in the atmosphere.

6:52 AM: The crepuscular rays were strong and clear. A friend in Williamsport got almost the same images, so atmospheric conditions were similar across the area.

6:52 AM.

6:55 AM: Some of the gold-rose hue is leaving the horizon. The Sun will soon clear the trees, but that will be fundamentally uninteresting. Plus, I knew I should head home, review my images, and get to work.

As I walked back towards my car I realized that with such strong, clear crepuscular rays, I might be able to see the rarer phenomenon of anticrepuscular rays, shadows cast by clouds that stretch across the sky and converge on the antisolar point - creating a "dark Sun setting" effect. I turned to the West toward the railroad bridge that had given some context to my images, and...

6:58 AM: Yep.

6:58 AM: Exactly as expected.

I walked back to my car, went home, and got ready to head to work.