The Day of the Eclipse

The Fire Nation was defenseless!

I ended up driving to San Saba from Austin due to the weather conditions. Much fewer clouds clogged the sky there, plus that town had more time in totality (3m47s!).

Today was breathtaking. I was surprised by the magnitude of the effect from being physically present under totality. I heard this in 2017, but only this time made the trek for me to innately appreciate and understand that myself. Even 95% totality is not the same.

You begin to feel the temperature drop around you, the wildlife goes silent, the light eerily dims from dusk to twilight, colors shift from what your brain knows they should appear, and the shadows spill into misplaced directions. Your body attempts to reconcile the sensory inputs, but it cannot. It has no reference.

“A total eclipse elicits a unique, visceral, primeval feeling that cannot be evoked by a photograph or a video or a newspaper article, and that can be experienced only within the path of totality when the moon completely obscures the disk of the sun.” - Ryan Milligan, solar physicist.

The environment around you, the view of the Sun’s corona with your bare eyes, the uniqueness of the moment, made for an exciting life event that I am elated to have witnessed firsthand.

I had a chance to sift through the captures from the Z8 (they are significantly more exquisite than what my phone saw). They turned out well overall (nowhere near perfect, but I’ll leave that to more solar focussed photographers :). I am happy with the results, and did not need any post processing too, so this set is right out of the camera.

I’ll note that my favorite shot is the header image above (the moment just after totality)! The selected items below are in chronological order.

Just barely beginning to touch the sun.

About halfway covered.

The tiniest sliver remained.

The moment of totality.

A view of the corona.

After totality, the sun peaks through and illuminates the clouds.

A sliver (after totality) and clouds.

The clouds came in overhead at right about the time of totality. Luckily was still about to see the eclipse between them, and they actually made for an interesting effect afterwards / in the later part of the photo set.

See the entire album here.