Solar Eclipse, Hamilton TX
I had the good fortune of viewing April 2024’s total solar eclipse from the hill country town of Hamilton, Texas. I enjoyed the local spirit; a small town celestially-blessed on this day, hotels full, streets packed with enthusiastic visitors, and tourism board bringing around a map for visitors to pin their hometowns. The coffee shop named a limited-run drink for the eclipse, which I bought, and I chatted with the women who ran it. Hundreds gathered on the courthouse’s lawn with camaraderie and a shared objective.
The difference between 95% and 100% solar coverage is roughly everything, in terms of perceptual experience. We perceive light logarithmically, not linearly, so 95% coverage of the sun feels much brighter than a reasonable expectation of 5% of normal daylight. The evolutionary benefit of this is discernment across a tremendous contrast range: clouds in the sky on a sunny day, shapes in the forest under starlight. At the crescent phase of the sun shown above, my surroundings were noticeably dimmer to the extent of regular cloud cover, though with crisp direct lighting rather than diffusion.
Note the visible sunspots dotting the above images.
On my back in stiff Texas grass, I took dozens of photos at different apertures, exposures, and ISO in search of a shot that would record the memory of the moment. Yet I am grateful for each time I took my eye off the viewfinder and watched the light dim around me, feeling the air cool and hearing birds sing. For the span of totality, the air cooled substantially and birds ceased song. I removed my eclipse glasses, and in the twilight, a soft orange glow encircled the entire horizon, akin to early sunrise reflecting from distant clouds and land.
An artifact of the moon’s pitted surface is that bits of coronal light appear to eat into its edges. Here, at the ‘diamond ring’ phase of the eclipse, a bit of sun (less than 1% of its surface) peeks past the moon’s edge, signaling time to return to eclipse glasses.
A final shot: with gusto, I took an accidental long exposure that created a neat tubelike effect.