Image 5 of 12
Eclipse 2024 - Totality with Diamond Ring Contact Sequences
Eclipse 2024-Totality and Contact Collage (R5 Traveler).jpg
This is a composite showing the sequence of events surrounding totality at the April 8, 2024 total eclipse of the Sun, from just before totality (at upper left) to just after totality (at lower right), with totality in the middle. Or, in eclipse terms, from just before second contact (C2) to just after third contact (C3).
Time runs from left to right here, with the last bit of the Sun's photosphere about to disappear behind the advancing dark disk of the Moon at top left, creating the diamond ring effect. As the sunlight disappears it breaks up into smaller bright bits, the Baily's Beads effect, created by sunlight shining through low craters and valleys on the edge of the Moon. What remains briefly, before the advancing edge of the Moon covers them, is a thin edge of pink light, the chromosphere, and at this eclipse, several pink prominences leaping off the surface of the Sun.
At lower right the reverse occurs, with a pink rim of the chromosphere appearing from behind the Moon first, followed by another show of beads of bright sunlight from the photosphere bursting through valleys on the lunar limb, until they merge to form the large bright final diamond ring. At the end of totality at this eclpse, a set of particularly large and detailed prominences appeared.
The prominences are pink from a combination of wavelengths, mostly from hydrogen, but also helium and magnesium emission lines.
The two time-lapse C2 and C3 sequences flank a central blend of exposures for the totally eclipsed Sun and its pearly corona, its outer atmosphere. I have chosen exposures to show just the brighter inner corona so as not to overpower the flanking images of the prominences and chromosphere.
The actual official start of totality at C2 and end of totality at C3 occur about halfway through each sequence. The glows around the diamond ring bursts of sunlight at either end are from the high cirrus clouds the Sun was embedded in at my site on eclipse afternoon. The angle of the imag
Time runs from left to right here, with the last bit of the Sun's photosphere about to disappear behind the advancing dark disk of the Moon at top left, creating the diamond ring effect. As the sunlight disappears it breaks up into smaller bright bits, the Baily's Beads effect, created by sunlight shining through low craters and valleys on the edge of the Moon. What remains briefly, before the advancing edge of the Moon covers them, is a thin edge of pink light, the chromosphere, and at this eclipse, several pink prominences leaping off the surface of the Sun.
At lower right the reverse occurs, with a pink rim of the chromosphere appearing from behind the Moon first, followed by another show of beads of bright sunlight from the photosphere bursting through valleys on the lunar limb, until they merge to form the large bright final diamond ring. At the end of totality at this eclpse, a set of particularly large and detailed prominences appeared.
The prominences are pink from a combination of wavelengths, mostly from hydrogen, but also helium and magnesium emission lines.
The two time-lapse C2 and C3 sequences flank a central blend of exposures for the totally eclipsed Sun and its pearly corona, its outer atmosphere. I have chosen exposures to show just the brighter inner corona so as not to overpower the flanking images of the prominences and chromosphere.
The actual official start of totality at C2 and end of totality at C3 occur about halfway through each sequence. The glows around the diamond ring bursts of sunlight at either end are from the high cirrus clouds the Sun was embedded in at my site on eclipse afternoon. The angle of the imag
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