Reader’s wildlife photos

For this edition we include the Sun and Moon as wildlife, as Jan Malik reports on the solar eclipse of April, 2024. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.  Oh, and Google “solar eclipse 2024” and see what you get!

The recent total solar eclipse in Europe reminded me of the Great North American Eclipse of April 8, 2024, which I had the opportunity to observe from the Adirondack Mountains of New York.

After spending the night in the back of my truck, I set off early in the morning toward the summit of Whiteface Mountain. This being early April, the roads and trails were still snowbound, which allowed for decent skiing. Whiteface Mountain, like Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, features a scenic toll road open in the summer. In winter, this path converts into a gentle, 5-mile cross-country ski course, safe even for bungling skiers like myself. I met another skier on my way up; our goal for the day was to reach the summit before 1 p.m., when the eclipse was about to begin:

The area was still quite snowy, and the summit observatory building was plastered solidly with snow:

In the summer, Whiteface Mountain is a tourist attraction and one of the few places in the USA where you can see the metric system at work:

The toll road winds up the mountain at a steady 8-degree incline. If you look closely, you can spot three hikers making their way up. Our main concern for the day was to pick an outlook with a clear view of the sky. Adirondack weather is notoriously unpredictable, but we were lucky that day, with only some wispy clouds in the sky:

As predicted, at about 1 p.m. we could see the Moon bite off a small piece of the Sun. All observations of the Sun must be done through a dark solar filter, except during totality. The filter I had bought was not of very high quality; it had an orange cast and severe dispersion issues:

After about half an hour, little remained of the Sun in my viewfinder:

Even with 99% of the Sun covered, it was still bright outside, but the light had an unusual, unsettling quality—quite subdued, but with a color temperature equal to normal daylight. Normally, we experience diminished light only at sunset or sunrise, when the color temperature shifts toward red, but here it happened almost at high noon. The picture doesn’t fully convey that experience; you have to see it to understand the strangeness of the moment:

Then it happened. Seemingly within a single second, the light went out, as if someone had flipped a giant switch, and what we saw above our heads no longer resembled our familiar day star. That was the only time we could observe the Sun with the naked eye. It is not a sensation easily described by words, but I—and I am sure everyone else—was stunned and overwhelmed by this transition from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. If you look closely, there are a few solar prominences visible in the lower half of the Sun’s disk, each of them larger than the Earth’s diameter:

Totality in this part of the Adirondacks lasted a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds, and that time passed quickly. Everyone was absorbed in the moment, trying to capture as much of it as possible, both in memory and on their devices. It became noticeably colder, and the only non-human animal present—a pet dog—started barking, unable to comprehend why the world had changed so abruptly:

We were in the so-called umbra (totality), but in the distance we could clearly see the distant horizon glowing where the shadow ended, marking the transition back to partial daylight:

The Sun high above frozen Lake Placid:

I was not prepared for the momentary shock of transitioning from the commonplace to the unworldly and let my photographic guard down, missing the “diamond ring” effect, where the Sun begins to shine again from behind the Moon’s cover. But some moments in life should be savored by observing rather than documenting:

The “diamond ring” lasts only a second or two, and after that, the switch is turned back on and the light reappears. The thermal death of the universe having been averted, it is back to using the filter to protect both eyesight and the camera:

As a bonus picture, here is the entire sequence of the Moon passing in front of the Sun’s surface over 2 hours. The colors are a bit uneven due to an unfortunate choice of camera settings—live and learn. The black specks are sunspots:

At the beginning of that day, I was curious if the hype surrounding the eclipse was somewhat inflated by the tourism lobby or if it was something truly worth seeing. In the afternoon, skiing down the toll road while trying to control my emotions, I knew that it was a mind-altering event that everyone should experience once in their life. I was lucky that it happened in my Adirondack backyard, with hassle-free access and familiar surroundings, but I would now travel far just to see one. The next eclipse, with an exceptionally long totality of more than 6 minutes, will occur over North Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia on August 2, 2027. People will be streaming in by the hundreds of thousands to see it, but crowds or not, I promise you will not regret it. Now is a good time to start making travel arrangements.