The Solar Eclipse of April 8, 2024

The total solar eclipse on April 8th this year was probably the last chance in my lifetime to actually see this amazing sight and, even so, I went back and forth in my mind about whether to try to see the totality or not. West Virginia was not in the path of totality, but even so, about 90% of the sun would be covered. The closest point to us inside the main path was just west (or north) of Columbus in Ohio – around 245 miles away, and the weather forecast for the day was not particularly good!

And, I thought, wouldn’t everyone’s photographs look the same? Apart from those overpowering social media with their invented scenes above the ocean, of course!

By the Friday before the eclipse on Monday, we were still undecided, but finally concluded that if we didn’t go and the weather turned out well, we would be really annoyed and so we booked a hotel room in Columbus for Sunday and another in Delaware, OH for the Monday night as I concluded (rightly) that the traffic away from Ohio on Monday evening would be horrendous!

Columbus Ohio – a lovely surprise!

We had never been to Columbus and so I was really not sure what to expect, but what we found on the Sunday afternoon was a lovely walkable city. Very quiet, it being a Sunday, we did all the immediate touristy things around the downtown area:

We were staying in the modern Canopy by Hilton hotel near the Convention Center (surprisingly I found no difficulty in finding vacancies in many places in Columbus and around the area on Sunday or Monday. Not sure where to go to eat, we noticed a steak restaurant next door – little did we know that it is one of the best steak restaurants in the country!

They had a reservation that evening at 8pm and so even if the weather on the next day let us down, we had had a great meal on our mini vacation!

The day of the Eclipse

As you can see from the photos above, Sunday was a perfect day – clear skies and not a hint of cloud cover! Monday was forecast to be almost 100% cloud cover in the morning, falling to 50% midafternoon! I had scouted out possible viewing areas and found a state beach park at Alum Creek that seemed to meet the bill. It wasn’t very far north of Columbus, and so a leisurely drive via the waterfall at Hayden Falls was planned. There had been a lot of rain in the previous few days and so that waterfall turned out to be much better than I expected – quite a heavy flow!

We decided to drive straight to the beach from there as the traffic was building up and were amazed to see the vast car park at this beach already filling up a couple of hours before the sun eclipse. People had brought beach chairs, picnics and were already spread out ready for the show! Even the statue in Delaware of President Harding (I think) was ready!

I was still in two minds about getting my camera out. I had planned to just appreciate the event, but as I saw the moon starting to cover the sun (with my glasses!) and seeing other photographers getting ready, I couldn’t help myself and I put my longest lens on the camera (400mm or about 8x magnification) and a very, very dark filter on the front. I have never tried to photograph the sun before and I was amazed to see just how bright it is! Even with this almost black filter on the lens, the shutter was only open for 1/5000th of a second. The sky was mainly covered in clouds, but thank goodness, they were very thin and transparent. With the eclipse maybe 30 minutes away, the car park was packed – I would guess around 2000 cars or more by this stage.

During the early stages, it is hard to notice much of a difference in the overall lighting around the area. But as the moon moved step by step across the surface of the sun, it started to feel like twilight, but with the sun still high in the sky – very strange! As we moved towards the final stages, the light dropped very quickly as though night was approaching quickly. I think the thin cloud cover probably meant that we lost some of the impact of a complete loss of light, but it was certainly eerie. It was hard to even find the sun in my viewfinder by this stage and my exposures had dropped by a factor of 5 or six as so much light was hidden by the moon.

Full eclipse seemed to come quickly and all we could see was the rim of the sun with small beads of light (called Baily’s Beads) where the sun is still visible through the valleys on the moon’s surface. I couldn’t see the red flare areas with my eyes by this stage, but I now know that they are called prominences – vast plumes of red-hot plasma above the surface of the sun with that one at the bottom being around three times the diameter of the earth in height. There were no reports of actual sun flares during the eclipse and these prominences didn’t move very much from frame to frame in my photographs. Finally, after a couple more minutes, the first edges of the sun became visible as the moon continued its path and the brightness started to grow, once again!

I put all my images together in a composite that you “read” from top left, around the edge, and finally ending up with this image in the center:

As the uncovering of the sun would look pretty much like the covering, we decided to jump in the car and get away! Of course, so did several hundred others, but after 20 minutes or so we were out on the main road and heading north (away from the flow of people leaving the area and heading back to Columbus.

A fantastic event and experience and one that I will always remember!