Cleveland is Shadowed by the Moon. It’s Nothing to Brag About, But We’ll Take it!

For those of you not lucky enough to be in the path of celestial events, I will give you a little tour of what a Total Eclipse of the sun was like today.

I've had some crude amateur experience photographing a partial eclipse of the sun that occurred in Cleveland in August of 2017. I didn't know a thing about photographing the sun or moon but I gave it a go back then, using an improvised camera filter made out of discarded 4x5 transparency film. (I am one of those nearly extinct species who uses a "real" camera these days.) This time around I tried using those cheapo dorky-looking Solar Eclipse glasses attached with duct tape as a camera filter. It worked out pretty well.

I arose this morning to a totally overcast day, but my worst fears (and Cleveland's) were abated when the sun came out around 10:30 AM and pushed the clouds aside. I did some test shots on the morning sun to get my bearings. I fiddled with some settings and I came up with this:

No, that is not a Florida orange and that is not a navel on its surface. It's a gigantic sunspot, dozens of times larger than our own planet. It kinda makes you feel small! Notice its position on the sun.

With camera and zoom lens mounted on a tripod, and filter crafted with Red Green technology, I caught the first wisp of our moon kissing the sun, at 1:59 PM:

As the moon creeps in at about the 5 o'clock angle of the sun, notice that the sunspot has already moved from its original position this morning, only about three or four hours after the earlier test shot was taken. It must be moving at incredible speed. Another smaller sunspot now appears, coming around from the other side, like a tiny bug crawling on a ripe fruit. The colors may not be completely uniform in these pictures because in order to bring out the detail I had to process these pictures by desaturating the color and reconstituting it by eye. They are also in sharper focus than the test shot.

The moon is now making a major move on the sun. You wouldn't know it from looking around or up at the sky. Only those people with the dorky-looking glasses know what is going on!

We are almost at the half-way point. My wife tried to take some pictures with her cell phone using the eclipse glasses but with no luck.

Things are really moving along. We have major coverage. It was getting just a little dimmer outside, but not nearly as dim as you would expect, seeing this picture. If you didn't know about the eclipse, you would not suspect anything was amiss at this point. Even just a little bit of sunshine is powerful enough to light up the sky. These filtered pictures are deceiving.

With over 90% coverage it was starting to look a little less bright outside, but still no inkling of what was to come. It just seemed as if a cloud was drifting in front of the sun.

That was my last filtered picture before the big blackout. It was getting noticeably dimmer outside as I scrambled to unwrap the duct tape holding the filter on my camera for this 2001 Space Odyssey event (for those of you under 40 you may have to look that up! And for those of you unaccustomed to classical music, look up "Also Sprach Zarathustra"). While the sun was still clinging to a tiny sliver of light, I snapped the first picture with the filter off of my lens:

An explosion of light overwhelms from the tiniest crack of light emanating from the sun. That's why we wear the dorky glasses. If you look closely you can see a very vague outline of the moon beneath the bright light. Yet within seconds of that last picture, I snapped this next one with no change in settings on the camera:

And suddenly, the curtain dropped and everything went dark in a matter of seconds. It's as if someone just blew out the candle at night! I've never seen anything like it before. Neighbors immediately began cheering and somebody nearby blew off fireworks! Once the lights went out, the celestial bodies seemed to just hang there in unison without moving. We could look directly at them with no filtered glasses. I knew that the time of totality was supposed to be only four minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. I began snapping multiple pictures at different shutter speed increments just to make sure I had a good shot. This next one was taken right in the middle of maximum totality, under which our house sat right smack in the middle, at 3:15 PM:

Wow! I've enhanced the tonal values in the next picture to show the corona more clearly (for you beer drinkers out there). It is much larger than you would deduce from the previous photo:

As Benny Hill once exclaimed when talking about his brave career as an astronaut, "I flew right into the Solar Plexus!"

Caryn alerted me to the fact that there was a kind of "dim sunset" in all directions, despite us being in the dark. When the interminable eclipse was over, the sun came roaring back with a blast as sudden as it had disappeared. Within seconds of the first tiny ray of light blaring through, I snapped one last picture without the filter on my camera:

Down the street I heard one of my neighbors playing George Harrison, singing "Here Comes the Sun."

This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.