Solar event
Started: 2023-10-15 20:21:51
Submitted: 2023-10-15 21:10:40
Visibility: World-readable
Watching the 2023 annular solar eclipse from my deck
Ahead of Saturday's annular solar eclipse, the thought crossed my mind to travel to somewhere in the path of the maximum eclipse, but the eclipse cut a weird swath across the United States through under-populated areas. In Santa Cruz, the sun would be about 75% eclipsed, which seemed good enough for me. The rest of my family would be happy to see the event from our deck without leaving the house. I ordered eclipse glasses, and threw in a solar filter for my camera.
When I got up on Saturday morning, the sky was partly cloudy (or maybe mostly cloudy), with a thick band of clouds obscuring the sun, but broken clouds above me. I could see blue sky in between the clouds, and the clouds were dramatically lit from the side by the rising sun. This seemed to portend an ill omen for the eclipse.
In Santa Cruz, the eclipse started at 08:05. The sun was peeking through the clouds, so I unwrapped my eclipse glasses and saw the first clear glimpse of the moon beginning to eclipse the sun. It looked like the sun had a bite taken out of it. By the point that the sun was visibly eclipsed, I gave Julian a pair of eclipse glasses and showed him the early stage of the eclipse.
It turned out that we didn't even need to step out onto the deck to see the eclipse; as long as the clouds cooperated, the rising sun was visible through the huge east-facing windows in our upstairs family room. It was a little awkward to walk around wearing the eclipse glasses, because they blocked so much of the light that it was difficult to see anything but the sun. The technique that worked the best for me was to walk into the sunlight facing away from the sun, put on the eclipse glasses, then turn my head towards the sun to see the eclipse.
I put the solar filter on my camera and tried to photograph the sun, but I wasn't happy with the results. I had trouble focusing and exposing the shot. Even when the clouds weren't directly blocking the sun, they were still lit from behind by the sun, and the automatic exposure wanted to expose the entire scene, so it ended up over-exposing the sun. I couldn't find my camera's tripod mount, and I didn't take the time I could have to mess with the exposure to get it to behave the way I wanted. This is my least-bad photo, which does at least look dramatic; and looking carefully there's a bit of the sun cut off at the top where the moon has begun to eclipse the sun.
Much of the time the sky looked like this, with the sun hiding behind a cloud, making it impossible to see the details of how far the eclipse had progressed.
As the moon eclipsed more of the sun, the clouds followed the moon's example, and I began to worry that we wouldn't be able to see the maximum eclipse at 09:20 at all. As the time grew closer I watched the sky, and when the moon had eclipsed 75% of the sun, the sun peeked through the patchy clouds, letting me see the sliver of the sun left exposed around the moon. It was an impressive sight.
I didn't even try to get a picture of the maximum eclipse, because I figured it would be futile. Instead captured the whole sky, including my neighbor's palm tree, as a representation of what I saw during most of the eclipse.
The moon continued moving across the path of the sun, now exposing more of the sun. The most important difference was that the moon's bite out of the sun was coming from a different part of the sun. Eventually the moon crossed out of the sun's path entirely and the sun was left to shine directly on us. The clouds cleared as well, now that we were no longer trying to view the astronomical event.
