Total Solar Eclipse // April 8th 2024
Greetings from Grand St. Mary's Lake, Ohio from Molly and I!
In 2017, I was able to experience the first total solar eclipse of my lifetime. Just a short drive from where I live, Roan County Community College was having a celebration, which my dad had found out about. Big speakers on the quad to play The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd front to back, a quick discussion and lecture an hour before it started to let us know what we would see and how to view the eclipse safely— it was wonderful.
I had no idea what I was doing with my camera that day, and I didn’t come home with any good shots, but that event stuck with me. I still think about that day often. The way the crickets and katydids started singing when totality hit, and the way the birds did the same as soon as totality was over. It was honestly moving.
This time around, I did a lot of research on what gear would be useful and my uncle picked up a couple astronomy magazines that helped me with understanding the types of photographs I could make with the gear I have. A couple years before the eclipse, I started making plans and gathering gear, and about 6 months out from April 8th, I started practicing photographing the sun.
Since this one was a little further to the totality zone for me (5+ hours drive), I wanted to be able to share my experience with others who weren’t able to travel out of state to see the eclipse, and I wanted to share the experience with one of my closest friends, Molly!
As it turns out, many of those who were able to travel had a hard time with the weather. Besides Ohio (where we traveled to), Arkansas and Texas were the other two most popular states I heard about, and both had a mostly cloudy to dark and rainy day, which is a shame. The first week of April, I started looking at the weather reports for the 8th, and talking to my dad (retired meteorologist) trying to wrap my head around whether or not we would have a good day for viewing, but all the way up until the morning of the eclipse, I was completely unsure.
While we explored downtown Dayton and Fairborn the night before, it rained off and on and had me a little nervous about the next afternoon, but thankfully, though with a few cirrus clouds in the area, in Saint Marys, Ohio we had a beautiful afternoon. If the clouds affected the images, it was to a minimal extent. It was 75 degrees and sunny there, and after hearing the stories from Texas and Arkansas, we were certainly blessed with better weather than we could have ever asked for.
So, the following sequence of photographs were taken from 1:51pm EST until 4:25pm EST, and they encompass the entire solar eclipse event. The 12 images from before and after totality were taken through a solar telescope, which allowed me to capture some detail on the surface of the sun, as well as a few solar flares off the sides. The two photographs from totality were taken right at the beginning and just before the end, and were shot on just a regular DSLR camera with a telephoto lens (more information about gear towards the end of this article).
This time around I had MUCH better gear, which made the process of capturing the eclipse much easier and yielded far higher quality results than before. Using a regular camera and telescope, the sun will appear mostly as an bright white dot through the lead up to and after totality, but with the use of a Coronado SolarMax telescope, I was able to see and capture a ton of detail on the suns surface.
The telescope was fitted to a ZWO AM5 mount, which was able to track the movement of the sun without much intervention by myself, and I attached my Olympus OM-D E-M1 MKII camera through a zoom eyepiece at about half strength to mostly fill up the frame with the whole sun.
For the photos I took during totality, I found this setup to be pretty good and very easy to use. I mounted my Canon 70-300mm lens on a 2x teleconverter to my Canon 40D camera, and used an ICE ND1000 to protect the sensor when not in totality. This was all mounted on a Sky-Watcher AZ-GTI mount, which tracked the movement of the sun very well.
That’s really about it! It was a wonderful trip, great driving weather during the long stretches there and back. Molly and I ate some great food and found some top tier pickles at Jungle Jim’s.
The next total solar eclipse anywhere near me wont be happening until August 12th, 2045 in Alabama or Florida, and I hope I’m able to do this all again when the time comes. I’d like to take the time to thank my dad for helping with so many aspects of this trip, from the planning to the gear and all the knowledge of telescopes and astronomy, there’s no way I could have ever made this trip and have it be such a success without him. Thanks, dad.
I’d like to thank my good friend Molly for coming along and helping out so much on this trip. Getting to explore new places with my favorite people will always be my favorite thing to do in life, and this may have been a short trip, but we made every minute count! A BIG thank you to Mark as well! I’m not gonna say why but THANK YOU, MARK!
Lastly, thanks to all the readers and supporters here! I’m not going to plug the subscribe button or anything, but this trip was made possible by my paid subscribers, and I’m blessed that I get to do things like this with your support. Thank you.
Well, that’s it for this week! I hope you enjoyed these photos! If you’re looking for more, please check out my page on Archive.org for the full list of digitized media. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a message right here or drop a comment below. If you haven’t already, please check out the one of my previous posts below, or all of my other previous posts here. Thanks so much for checking out this week’s edition of Diptych!
See you soon!
—Forrest
The weather couldn't have been worse for me day of but seeing these makes it all better!
These Are Beautiful!