Eclipse sequence from partial to total - August 21, 2017
Humans have accurately
predicted solar eclipses since ancient Mesopotamian times. Given that the occurrence of a total solar
eclipse is about once per continent per human lifetime it is highly likely that
during your lifetime an eclipse will happen over the landmass on which you
live. You should see the eclipse.
An eclipse is a unique astronomical event that you should witness one at
least once, even if you must travel a great distance. You’ll never see (or feel) anything
comparable. It cannot be overemphasized, each and every
human being should see at least one total solar eclipse.
I traveled a great distance, 1100
miles, to witness and photograph the Great American Eclipse of 2017 and it was worth
every highway mile, overpriced hotels, bad fast-food, a minor sunburn and even
spending one night sleeping in the car.
I saw the eclipse from the automotive homage to England’s Stonehenge, Carhenge, which is located in Alliance,
Nebraska.
Last summer, when I first learned of the 2017 solar
eclipse, I had a photo-shoot already in the planning stages. I’d be photographing ‘land art’ installations
featuring automobiles including Carhenge. The August 21 total solar eclipse would span
the entirety of the North America and I wondered, will the shadow fall over Nebraska?
A quick Google search and, yes!
The moon’s shadow would traverse the sky directly above Alliance,
Nebraska. I scheduled the photo-shoot in
Nebraska for August 21 and would get two
subjects –Carhenge and the eclipse. How
cool is that?
Not as cool as I thought. I taught myself about Solar Filters,
protecting my eyes and my camera’s sensor, exposure data, and all that. I read a lot of books and visited a lot of
astronomy websites and many ‘experts’ were saying the same thing about optimum
viewing locations –go to Alliance, Nebraska.
The highest probability of clear skies is in the middle of the
continent, away from the coasts. Since
it was looking like I would have a lot of company on the Nebraska plains I
tried to book a local hotel room a full ten months before the event. Not cool.
All lodgings in Alliance and nearby Scottsbluff, Nebraska were totally
booked! And they were booked at the
‘special eclipse viewing’ rates of $400 - $900 per night instead of the usual
$60.00! Luckily I found a room at a less
than extortionate price, thirty miles away in Bridgeport, Nebraska. Then I read in the Scottsbluff newspaper that
the Alliance Chamber of Commerce would be expecting 10,000 ‘eclipse visitors.’
(The population of Alliance is 8500.)
This is going to be a ‘Solar Woodstock’ event!
During the ‘eclipse research’ phase
I was reminded of all the mythology surrounding eclipses. Primitive men did not understand eclipses and
ascribed supernatural explanations for what they were witnessing. Hopefully, and despite national anti-science
sentiments, no one still believes that eclipses are caused by the sun being
eaten by a frog, wolf or dragon; or the sun being stolen by dogs or bitten by a
bear. Despite our collective scientific knowledge
of orbital dynamics there still is a lot of pseudoscience that comes from the
New Age and Astrology communities.
Notions like a disruption of the Earth’s magnetic field and people’s own
bodily systems may have some validity while other ideas such as evil omens,
beginnings and endings, life-changing events and enhanced emotions have no
scientific causation or correlation.
Three weeks before the eclipse I
‘rehearsed’ photographing the sun using a timer set to two and a half minutes
–the duration of totality; just how many photos can I shoot in one-hundred and fifty seconds? There’s nothing quite like the pressure of
photographing a thing that will fry your eyes if you look at it, only comes
around every hundred years or so, lasts less than three minutes, and you really
can’t practice or test for it. This
ain’t no wedding portrait! Testing,
practicing and rehearsing paid off. I
got the shot while I saw others struggle with equipment, not getting the shot
or really observing the eclipse. Luck favors
the prepared.
Solar filter test, pre-eclipse
Driving north on highway 25 through
Colorado I saw signs on the highway warning of ‘heavy eclipse traffic’ but saw
none of it. On the road between
Sterling, Colorado and Alliance, Nebraska I prepared myself for traffic like
I’d seen on TV from Oregon, but encountered none. I rolled into the Carhenge parking lot at
10:30AM the day before the eclipse without incident or delay. There was no overnight parking or camping
allowed at Carhenge but one tenth of a mile up the highway a farmer made his
bean field available to campers for forty-five dollars a day. I happily paid the fee (happy that it wasn’t
a hundred bucks – which I would have paid) and claimed a spot on high ground.
Relieved that I’d staked out my
special spot on Earth today to photograph the sun tomorrow I had a full day to
kill before the big astronomical alignment.
With ten thousand-plus boneheads with cel-phones coming in from all
over, we were happily surprised to have free wi-fi in the bean field! Verizon even trucked in portable cel-phone
towers so we could all update social media, real-time. There were souvenir sellers, t-shirt sales,
food vendors, and ice and water was for sale.
Plenty of Porta-Cans too. Ten
miles down the road, in Alliance itself, there was an Indian Pow-Wow, softball
games, rock bands playing and all the churches put out food for the weary
eclipse-travelers. All in all, the city
of Alliance, had a well-organized plan and there were no incidents of theft or
violence of any kind. I felt confident
that after the eclipse nobody would burn things or overturn cars the way they
do when some sports team wins a championship.
Everyone was nice, friendly and well-behaved. One old guy passed out from the heat and the
EMTs took him away and that was it.
I had a tasty BBQ sandwich from one
of the vendors for lunch and watched a steady stream of eclipse-viewers fill
the bean field the rest of the day. By
late afternoon Sunday the field was nearly full of RVs, tents, teardrops, and
various kinds of shades and shelters. I
watched City Dads struggle with brand-new tents. A parade of white legs walked by. There must have been a hundred million
dollars of Canon, Nikon and Celestron glass pointed skyward. On Sunday the Alliance airport had a fly-in
breakfast and was overwhelmed by 250 private planes ---a certain famous
actor/pilot was allegedly there but I didn’t see Han Solo or the Millennium
Falcon anywhere. In the afternoon I
wandered around the bean field and down the hill to Carhenge and talked to people: Camping next to me was Alex and Austin, a
couple of guys from Bismark, North Dakota, fully prepped with beer and eclipse
glasses. Janice and her two daughters
were nearby, setting up multiple telescopes and cameras. There was Halter-Top Hanna, the unwashed New
Age-Hippie chick laying out crystals to be ‘charged’ under the special ‘eclipse
light.’ Shaman-Sam looked ready for a
photon-bath, whoa dude put on a shirt! I
met Sonny (real name!) an ‘eclipse-chaser’ who proudly told me, “This is my
tenth eclipse!” I didn’t meet any
flat-Earthers or climate change-deniers.
Everyone was happy to be here, after all, for some reason they’d been compelled to come here, like me.
They came in large numbers from all
over. Most people I spoke to traveled
between 250 and 500 miles to see totality.
After the eclipse I spoke to the proprietor of the Meadowlark Hotel in
Bridgeport where I stayed two nights; the Sunday before the eclipse she had
reservations for people from China, Japan, Australia, France, England and
Austria. Crowd size estimates had about
5000 people in the immediate area of Carhenge, 10,000 when the surrounding
areas were included. For the entire
Alliance area the estimate was 20,000 eclipse-viewers!
On Monday August 21, 2017 millions
of people temporarily migrated to the path of totality that stretched from
Portland, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina.
They all did this to see the moon’s seventy-mile-wide shadow, traveling
at 1800 miles per hour pass over them for about two minutes!
Quite a fright with the morning fog, fortunately it did not last to obscure the eclipse.
On eclipse day we woke up to a fright,
it was completely fogged-in! Well, if I don’t get the shot it’s not my
fault. Janice, my camper-neighbor
came over, tablet in hand and said, “I’ve got a NOAA weather app here that says
the temps dropped last night, we hit the dew point and this is just ground fog
that ought to burn-off in an hour.” She
was right! And thanks again to the
farmer for the free wi-fi!
Actually, the scare with the fog
just made seeing the eclipse even more precious.
While the fog dissipated the Bismark
boys made a coffee run and we began our day fully caffeinated. Another guy wandered through the campground
selling cinnamon rolls. Eclipse excitement
grew as thousands of tripods, cameras, telescopes and binoculars were
set-up. My set-up included a main
camera, a full-frame Canon DSLR with a 400mm lens (which is an 8x
magnification); a Lumix micro four-thirds camera as back-up for the main
camera; and Canon G7 which was a back-up for the back-up. I also ran a Kodak HD video camera and took a
few photos with my Android phone. I was
well rehearsed and ready for the show to start.
When the show did start it was hard
to tell. Someone in the crowd yelled
out, “First contact,” and we peered sunward through our eclipse-glasses to see
a tiny notch taken out of the sun by the moon.
I shot photos about every fifteen minutes to document the progression of
moon occluding the sun. Without looking
at the sun through eclipse-glasses, you really didn’t know there was an eclipse
happening until the moment of totality, yes, Sol is that bright. During the first phase of the eclipse
everyone was shooting photos or looking through telescopes. Janice was struggling with camera alignment
and I assisted her from time to time. No
one was competitive and everyone helped each other to get the best photos and
have the best experience. A few minutes
before totality a panicked man came by asking for tape, duct tape,
anything! He had a homemade, 3D-printed
holder for his solar filter that had broken at just the wrong moment. I handed him a roll of duct tape, the second
most important thing in my camera bag, and told him, “Take it, make your repair
and get the shot, bring the roll back later.”
He thanked me profusely and was off.
Only at the moment right before
totality did the light change enough to be noticed, and it only darkened like a
cloud had passed over the sun. Solar
filters came off the cameras and everybody got ready…
Totality!
Totality over Carhenge (Composite)
And then it was dark. Sunset all around. Birds quiet and crickets chirping. It had gone from midday to twilight in an
instant and it was weird… And it was
indescribably spectacular. Through my
telephoto lens I could see the diamond ring, the sun’s photosphere, the solar
flares and prominences and everything! I got the shot! And I got the shot again! Totality was magic, an incredible sight. I will not use a tired, clichéd sex metaphor
here, but it was over way too quick! Two
and a half minutes later, third contact and totality was over, the landscape
brightened and the moon began to uncover the sun. The crowd cheered. Wow!
Just wow!
The air temperature had dropped
about ten degrees during totality but we only noticed afterwards, when it began
to warm up again. I continued
photographing the waxing eclipse but many were already taking down tents and
packing up to leave like it was the eighth inning of the ballgame and they’re
going to beat the traffic (they didn’t).
The guy with the broken solar filter holder returned my duct tape and
gave me a big hug, “Oh man, you saved the shot, thank you, thank you, thank
you!” I was happy to help out and I’m
happy he got the shot. Never travel
without duct tape.
I can completely understand how a
total solar eclipse would scare the living crap out of Neanderthal Man. He knew (unlike a certain Cheeto-toned ‘world
leader’) not to look at the sun so he wouldn’t see it coming. He’d be going about his day, hunting and
gathering or whatever, and then suddenly day would turn to night. Without understanding the science behind what
had happened he’d better sacrifice a virgin, you know, to appease the gods.
President Cheeto stares at the sun with unprotected eyes.
By about 1 pm it was just a regular
day again --except I was standing in a hot bean field with 10,000 new friends,
the sun high in the sky. I packed up,
bade farewell to my eclipse friends and bugged-out. Ten miles later I found that traffic I’d
missed the day before and spent the next three hours driving thirty miles to
Bridgeport. Oh well, I’m glad I didn’t
catch this traffic on the way in.
After check-in and a much needed
shower all of the memory cards from the eclipse cameras went into secure case
and into my shirt pocket, never to be away from my person until I returned to
my studio in Prescott. The images on
those cards were more precious than gold!
Then it was off to the bar and dinner.
The restaurant was nearly full and everyone was still buzzing about the
eclipse earlier in the day. Even the
waitresses stopped serving long enough to go out in the parking lot and see the
eclipse.
I spent the next day in Bridgeport
as well. I drove back to Carhenge,
picked up a few extra photos minus the crowd and shot a few more photos of the
(relatively clean) aftermath. I had a
second photo-shoot in Utah and it took me a few extra days to get home. Driving alone across Colorado and Utah gave
me a lot of time to think and ‘process’ what I’d witnessed:
An eclipse can be called a ‘fixed
astronomical event.’ The solar eclipse
that just happened was going to happen exactly as it did no matter what. If there were no humans or any other
conscious entities on Earth to witness the eclipse, it would have occurred
exactly the same way unseen. And this is
where I think it gets interesting, not to be a nihilist, but nothing has any
intrinsic meaning of its own and all ‘meaning’ ascribed to the eclipse-event is
applied by human observers. So, in terms of ‘meaning,’ we get out of it
what we bring to it. The New-Ager-types
got their crystals charged or chakras cleansed or whatever, the
scientific-types gathered data and perhaps greater understanding of the
universe’s clockwork. Others were merely
curious, satiated by a new experience.
For some it was an excuse for a party, for kids, a day off from
school. Everyone got something positive
out of it and with those good feelings multiplied by ten or twenty thousand
souls, well that’s palpable positivity –a shared experience, good for
everyone.
For me it was a range of
feelings. Immediately after totality I
felt profoundly exhausted. Was my
fatigue caused by a sudden change in gravity or energy? Did the eclipse itself cause my sudden
tiredness? Possibly. But more likely the culmination of planning,
preparation, travel, discomfort, and the anxiety of only having two and a half
minutes to get a photo and actually
getting the photo suddenly being fulfilled might be a more realistic cause
for fatigue. As a photographer I
successfully met a unique technical challenge and as an artist I’d generated
new imagery for future works. I’d
witnessed a beautiful temporary ‘light event’ more incredible than a Pink Floyd
concert! I met a whole lot of
interesting folk in the bean field and shared a communal experience. But moreover, as a human, I felt my place in
the universe. Seeing the eclipse in its
full totality glory underscored my humanity.
I am here! I am alive! I have perceived
this rare and fleeting thing and have made it permanent in my memory. It is significant because I have seen it and
it is real because others saw it too. I
see, therefore I am! The eclipse would
have occurred just as it did even if no one saw it, but without witnesses there
is no Wow Factor.
Wow!
Wow times millions of witnesses!
To conclude, here’s the opening
paragraph again. I really mean it.
Given that the occurrence of a total
solar eclipse is about once per continent per human lifetime it is highly
likely that during your lifetime an eclipse will happen over the landmass on
which you live. You should see the eclipse.
An eclipse is a unique astronomical event and you should witness one at
least once, even if you must travel a great distance. You’ll never see (or feel) anything comparable. It
cannot be overemphasized, each and every human being should see at least one
total solar eclipse.
Me (center) and the 'Bismark Boys' tripod at the ready, pre-eclipse
Afterword
Exactly one week after the
positivity of the eclipse negativity reigned supreme again as hurricane Harvey
flooded Texas. It seemed as if, for only
one day, everyone forgot about their troubles, ignored the daily depression of
the Donald Trump shitshow, and collectively enjoyed a rare, and joyous,
astronomical event. Sadly some people
didn’t believe the warnings not to look
at the sun and injured their eyes.
Google reported a significant increase in the number of searches using
the words ‘my-eyes-hurt.’ Ophthalmologists
reported newly blind patients with eclipse-shaped crescents burned into their retinas. And on TV we saw president not-a-role-model
staring at the sun, eyes unprotected, until someone told him not to. It’s sad, but it’s hard to feel bad for
people who willfully injure themselves because they think the warnings are ‘fake
news’ just to sell more eclipse glasses.
Even though I’ve been working
professionally for 35 years I still learned one important photographic lesson –sandbags! Right after totality, when the temps began to
rise again the winds increased. The
winds were so strong they blew over my main camera and tripod. Oops, there goes six grand of camera and lens
crashing to the Earth! Fortunately the
soft grass and the lens’ filter-holder took the impact and nothing was damaged
except the solar filter (I took the last couple of shots with my back-up
camera). This will not happen again as I
now own two, twenty pound sandbags that I will use to stabilize the tripod in
the future.
This was the first ‘digital
photography’ eclipse in America and millions
of photos were shot of the event. For those
that got the shot, they all look pretty much the same. A few photographers set up and shot that one ‘hero’
photo. For me, adding the partial and
totality shots to my library will make for some very cool composite images.
The next total solar eclipse that
will be seen in the USA will occur on April 8, 2024 and the path of totality
will go through central Texas. Totality
should last a little over three minutes.
As much as I despise the state of Texas I may have to go there and shoot
another eclipse now that I have some experience.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
For the solar
photography I used a Canon 5D MkIII with a cable-release mounted on a tripod. The lens was a Canon 100-400mm zoom at
400mm. A hydrogen-blocking solar filter
from Thousand Oaks Optical was used for all the solar photographs. (No filter was necessary during
totality.) I used eclipse viewers and
glasses also from Thousand Oaks Optical.
I set up a second
camera as back-up. It was a Panasonic
Lumix G-1 with a Lumix 45-200mm lens at 200mm (400mm equivalent). Also equipped with the same solar filter. The Canon camera didn’t fail so I didn’t need
this camera and only shot a few photos with it.
For the editorial
photography I used a Panasonic Lumix GX-1 with Lumix lenses of 7-14mm, 14-45mm,
45-200mm and a 20mm lens.
