I had a great time admiring the Solar Eclipse this time. Not only was I prepared much better than 2017, I had excellent company with Somesh, Sanjay, Nitin & Ansh for company. So, setting up the telescopes and watching the eclipse along with the photography was relatively stress-free and real fun! The only bad thing was 11 hours ride back (normally 7.5 hours). Way too many people showed up in northern New England! But that’s how it should be and every minute spent on this was well worth it. Or how Somesh said – it was Paisa Wasool (roughly translated, money and time worth spent).

There are 7 images in here. The first one is a summary image that captures all the remaining 6 images and also provides a summary of the progression of the bite of the Sun by the Moon (along with the timestamps).

This next one below is called the Diamond Ring Effect as this is the time when Moon is coming really close to covering the Sun, and there is still some light coming from Sun on one side that makes the area brighten up like a diamond ring.

As Moon covers more of the Sun, the last seconds show these little beads on the left as some of the light peers through the valleys of the Moon and that’s why it’s called Bailey’s Beads. See below:

This next one below is when Sun was fully covered by the Moon and you can see Sun’s corona on all sides (with your naked eye too)!

The corona of the Sun extends to millions of kilometers and I captured this phenomenon by taking multiple long-exposure images (up to 4 seconds) and stacking them, as you can see in the image below these nice filaments extending far far away from the Sun .

Toward the end of the totality, as the Moon moved out to the left limb of the Sun, the solar flares on the right side became visible. Prominences are shaped by the Sun’s complex magnetic field, often forming loops with each end anchored to the Sun’s surface. Prominences are enormous, extending out for many thousands of kilometers. The one that we saw today was one of the largest ones and probably extended as large as 6-10 times Earth’s diameter!! It looked way more beautiful in our eyes (through a telescope) than these pictures and they were visible even without a telescope. This is a close up of those prominences.