8 April 2024
The main event has arrived! We arrived at the Frio Bat Cave around 10:30 AM after a 3 1/2 hour drive from Laredo. Now all we had to do was settle in and wait.
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| Gathering at the viewing area - for both the eclipse, and later, the bats. ABC News and National Geographic were there to broadcast live. (Blogger won’t let me upload even a single frame screenshot.) |
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| The clouds were rather thick - not a good omen. But occasionally the sun would poke through. |
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| Patrick Treuthardt, astronomer with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, explains the eclipse with a model. |
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| More explanations from Patrick. |
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| Ready for totality. |
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| A crescent sun through light clouds. In some respects, the clouds made it easier to photograph the partial phases, since a solar filter was not needed. |
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| Getting closer to totality. |
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| Almost there. |
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Totality! The four minutes went by quickly, but this was much longer than our previous eclipses: about 2 minutes in Oregon in 2017, and only 1 minute in Australia in 2023. During totality, we had about three 5-second views of the corona. The darkness was nearly complete between the blocked sun and the clouds.
I had my camera set for what worked great for previous eclipses, but neglected to account for the clouds, so the photos were very underexposed. Photoshop was able to resurrect some details - including solar prominences (red spots along the rim). Since the sun is very active now - near the solar maximum for sunspots - there were plenty of solar flares this year. |
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| The partial phase after the eclipse. This photo was taken with the solar filter on my camera (hence the orange color), and you can tell that there were still some light clouds in front of the sun. |
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| The ABC News / National Geographic crew packing up. |
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