Thursday, July 22, 2010

And The Clouds Parted



On July 11th at 18:45 universal time, the moon passed directly in front of the sun.

And I was there to see it.

It was gloriously f**king awesome. (Excuse my Anglo-Saxon. :-)

When we woke eclipse morning on the French Polynesian atoll of Tatakoto, it was raining! But the clouds parted for first contact, and then the sun played hide and seek until just before totality, when I got this shot of the diamond ring effect amongst the clouds.

It cleared for totality and then clouded over not long after. It was my first eclipse and it was everything I hoped it would be.

More posts of my trip to follow ...

*****

Update 7/26/2010

It turns out that this may be an image of a rather unique phenomena, eclipse shadow bands. Even more intriguing, is that this is the first time shadow bands have been reported seen in clouds. All of the other reports have been on the ground.

My image, and a number of other images and videos form the path of totality, is actually being used by an astronomer at Steward Observatory in Arizona, Glenn Schneider, to determine if these are really shadow bands.

I think it is incredibly cool that one of my images, from my first eclipse, may have captured something "historically unique".

8 comments:

Ron a.k.a. Danudin said...

French Polynesia, You Cheapskate!
When you said I was there, I thought that you meant the MOON, What a view that would have been and what vision with the only light being that reflected from the Earth. Seriously though, Well Done! My Knees are Green with Envy!

Kerri said...

Beautiful shot, Steve!

Ron a.k.a. Danudin said...

Steve I just saw the Astronomy Photo of the day at:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Your photo blows that outta the sky, couldn't NASA afford your price, Bloody Shuttle!

terricreates said...

Fantastic Steve, its just fantastic.

Susan Gets Native said...

Sparkly! Shiny!

MevetS said...

Thanks everybody.

The image Ron is referring to can be found here.

(Ron linked to the current page, which changes daily.)

KarenS (klsbear) said...

Very cool image and even more so given it's historical uniqueness - Wow!

Anonymous said...

Amazing sight! And I agree with Ron, your shot is way better. Keep us posted as to the confirmation of the uniqueness of the bands...