#bailey's beads

[iuilefae]

Totality during the Solar Eclipse, 2024.

[whattolearntoday]

A bit of May 3rd history...

1715 - Edmond Halley observes total eclipse phenomenon “Bailey’s Beads” 

1921 - West Virginia imposes 1st state sales tax

1947 - Japan’s post-war constitution goes into effect, granting universal suffrage, stripping Emperor Hirohito of all but symbolic power, and outlawing Japan’s right to make war

1970 - Trans-Arabian Pipeline delivering oil from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean is interrupted in Syria, driving oil tanker prices to all time high

1971 - National Public Radio (NPR) begins programming (pictured)

1978 - 1st unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (spam) is sent

[earthstory]

Original caption (Check this one out!):

I hope you enjoy this view of the 'Great American Eclipse', captured in Idaho and the Tetons on 21st August 2017. Best viewed with the lights down and the music up.

It has taken me all of the nearly two years since the eclipse to develop and apply the specialised eclipse image processing and video editing skills required to create this.

The video features footage from 7 out of 12 cameras I had running on the day. Six were onsite at South Menan Butte, Idaho. The other two cameras were at remote locations established in the days leading up to the eclipse: Table Mountain, Wyoming looking over the Tetons and another in the foothils of the Beaverhead Mountains (south of Blue Dome) looking over the Snake River Plains of Idaho.

More info:

philhart.com/the-moon-in-motion

philhart.com/content/idaho-solar-eclipse

Music by my talented friend, cellist and composer Kristin Rule:

kristinrule.com/

Some things to note in the video:

Partial Eclipse: The Moon moves across active sunspot groups which were unexpected for this eclipse nearing solar minimum.

Approaching Shadow from South Menan Butte: The thin dark band of the approaching shadow of the Moon gives an unusual insight into the thickness of the atmosphere that we see from side on, above a distant horizon.

Snake River Plain, Idaho: Note the shadow moving rapidly across the hazy cloud band, with Venus visible high in the sky above the Sun, and soft yellow twilight glow around the horizon.

On Location: My Takahashi FS-102 telescope capturing the eclipse. The red lights on the mount and the camera indicate how dark it gets during totality. There's a thermometer hanging on the telescope which I was using to guide adjusting the focus as the temperature dropped during the eclipse. You can also see the filter on the telescope removed as totality starts.

Widefied Corona: The diamond ring at second contact (start of the total eclipse) gives way to a wide view of coronal streamers of the Sun's atmosphere. The bright star Regulus appears in the frame also. Captured primarily with a Borg 77EDII telescope and Canon 5D Mark IV camera (automated with Eclipse Orchestrator) and a Pentax 300mm ED IF lens and Canon 6D.

Eclipse over the Tetons: Note the shadow racing away across the landscape at left of the Teton's Range.

I hiked the 11,100ft (3,387m) summit of Table Mountain three days before the eclipse to plant an automated camera hidden down the east ridge, with the highly uncertain hope of capturing footage on eclipse day. The Canon 5D Mark IV reliably churned away at more than three full size RAW files per second for six minutes covering totality and a few minutes either side. But on the hike back up on the day after the eclipse, I learned from other hikers that my camera had fallen over (in the wind) and therefore that the whole affair had likely been in vain. Read more about how lucky I am to have captured this unique sequence:

philhart.com/eclipse-over-the-tetons

Corona Close-Up: Baily's Beads, as the edge of the Sun breaks up into beads through hills and mountains on the rough edge of the Moon give way to a high resolution view of the solar corona with coronal loops, helmet streamers and polar plumes. If you watch carefully during totality you can see the motion of the Moon from right to left against the corona, particularly so as it reveals the giant red prominence on the right side, until the Sun reappears from behind the Moon, bringing an end to an eclipse that I had been anticipating, planning and rehearsing for for over three years prior.

All of the visuals were captured on camera on the day. While there is some significant HDR processing and multi-camera compositing there are no CGI or Photoshop creations.

[whattolearntoday]

A bit of May 3rd history...

1715 - Edmond Halley observes total eclipse phenomenon “Bailey’s Beads” (pictured)

1921 - West Virginia imposes 1st state sales tax

1947 - Japan’s post-war constitution goes into effect, granting universal suffrage, stripping Emperor Hirohito of all but symbolic power, and outlawing Japan’s right to make war

1970 - Trans-Arabian Pipeline delivering oil from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean is interrupted in Syria, driving oil tanker prices to all time high

1971 - National Public Radio (NPR) begins programming

1978 - 1st unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (spam) is sent

[earthstory]

Extreme close up, real time view of the Eclipse, with great shots of solar prominences and Bailey’s Beads

[earthstory]

evosia A video of the solar eclipse showing the Solar Prominences and Bailey's Beads as the sun emerges from behind the moon. Shot in 8K with the Red Epic-W.

[everybittexas]

The last thing you see before the sky goes dark is light breaking apart. That's what was happening in Dallas on April 8, 2024, just before totality swallowed the sun whole. Bailey's Beads — those final desperate fragments of sunlight — were squeezing through the valleys and craters along the moon's edge, turning the last seconds of daylight into something that looked less like an eclipse and less like anything you've ever seen before. NASA photographer Keegan Barber caught it at the Dallas Arboretum. And look, Dallas gets grief from basically everyone — too sprawling, too concrete, too "is that even really Texas." But on this particular Monday, Dallas was sitting directly inside a corridor of totality that swept all the way from Mexico's Pacific coast up through the continent to Newfoundland. The moon picked its path, and that path went through Dallas. Bailey's Beads only exist for a few seconds. They're named after Francis Baily, who described the phenomenon in 1836, but humans had been watching them in confused terror for thousands of years before anyone thought to write it down. They're not supposed to look the way they do — fire and darkness at the same time, a ring that is somehow also broken, light behaving like it's making a decision. The partial eclipse was visible across all of North America, plus chunks of Central America and Europe. Millions of people looked up. But only the people standing inside that narrow corridor got to watch the beads form and dissolve, got to feel the temperature drop, got to hear the birds go quiet. Texas has a way of being the place where things happen at full scale — storms, droughts, distances, crowds. An eclipse path cutting through the state feels appropriate. The sky put on its most extreme performance, and Texas was in the front row. There's something worth sitting with here: Bailey's Beads are light from a star 93 million miles away, threading through mountains on a rock 238,000 miles away, landing on your retinas for three or four seconds before the moon finishes its geometry. The odds of any of that lining up — the distances, the sizes, the timing — are absurd. Earth's moon happens to be almost exactly the right size and distance to produce a perfect total eclipse. A little closer or farther and you'd never see the corona. You'd never see the beads. We live on the one planet in the solar system where this particular light show is even possible. And on April 8, 2024, Dallas got to be where it happened. How many people who watched it understood they were watching something geometrically unique in the known universe?

[whimbox-blog]

whimbox 8/21/17 .' \\Ë c l i p s e, diamond ring - gnir of E l o h i m .... . . . .. . .. . .. . .