Throwback Thursday - The Strangest Photo I've Ever Taken

    Thirty years ago this past week on a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I set up to take a series of photos to capture a wildfire-enhanced sunset with the picturesque Corolla Lighthouse in the foreground.   The wildfires were nowhere near the east coast but were actually the historic 1,000,000 acre blaze in and around Yellowstone National Park nearly 2,000 miles away.  The fire blackened over half a million acres within the park boundary or 63% of the park.

   The smoke and ash was carried eastward by the jetstream and created a milky haze that made its way to the Atlantic coast. The airborne particulate created colorful sunrises and sunsets across the US for weeks.

    In that summer of 1988 I had recently purchased a set of Cokin Filters and experimented with them in conjunction with Kodachrome and Ektachrome slide film.  The photo below shot on Kodachrome 200 was the startling result of stacked Cokin red, orange and yellow filters handheld in front of a $99 Kmart 500mm f/8 lens.

 I had one of those 'I remember exactly where I was' moments in life when I first previewed the box of processed slides in my Chevy Nova parked outside of the old Positive Images photo shop in Riverview. The inexplicable way the rim of the sun is darker than the surrounding sky was and still is jaw-droppingly confusing.  In the weeks following the North Carolina trip I tried to duplicate the effect using the same setup but never came close. 

   The photo above was copied in a cheap slide duplicator to convert it to a digital format.  The digital version was not enhanced in any way and in fact pales slightly compared to the original slide.

Total Eclipse 8/21/2017

    Disclaimer : These photos do no justice to the spectacle created by the Moon blotting out the late morning Sun.

  It started innocently enough as a small notch formed on the upper right edge of the Sun.

   The bite got bigger....

....until our local star showed a fat crescent.

   It progress until only a sliver remained

    After the last ray of sun shined through a deep crater on the Moon's rim creating a diamond ring effect(not pictured), the elusive solar corona appeared.  A close look at the photo below reveals a red promenience at the same position that the moon's transit started.

  A longer exposure shows the star Regulus  (circled) to the lower left of the eclipsed Sun.

 

He had to stay home because he couldn't pass the eclipse safety test.

Prismatic Sun

  Last week despite driving 80 miles to the east, trying to outrun an encroaching cloud-bank, I still missed out on the sunset partial eclipse.  Although the main event was obscured, my practice shots taken the day before yielded evidence of an interesting atmospheric sunset phenomenon.
  As the sun gets lower in the sky it shines through denser layers of atmosphere.  The thicker atmosphere's refractive properties have a prismatic effect on the Sun, allowing its image to be separated into its component colors.  Meaning the sun's red wavelengths set first and the blue-green set last.  The first image shows the red breaking away at the bottom.

   Later as the solar disk was slipping below the horizon the green wavelengths of light were lingering above the Sun.

 

   Over the past week a massive sunspot complex, the size of Jupiter has been making its way across the face of the Sun.  Today I noticed that the sunspots could be seen through thickening clouds and was able to get some photos with the clouds acting as a solar filter.

Lunar Eclipse 10/8/2014

   

   Left for work over an hour early to try to photograph the lunar eclipse.  Took the first photo as I was loading up the car, before the eclipse started.

5:06 AM

  The first place I looked to set the photo gear was a lakeside park on the shore of America's Great Lake, but 30 mph winds had the beach sand blowing and drifting across the parking lot.  Plan B was to set up a little closer to work, a decision that cost me photos of the beginning of the eclipse, but allowed me to get the more important totality shots right up to the time I needed to be through the gate.

5:32 AM

5:50 AM

6:08 AM

6:10 AM

6:29 AM

  An added bonus to this lunar show was that the planet Uranus was just over a half of a degree from the Moon at the time it was immersed in the Earth's shadow.  It was the first time I was able to photograph the 7th planet from the Sun.  Insert your own middle school joke here.....

   Earlier in the week I took some practice sunset shots for the partial solar eclipse coming up on the 23rd.

leaning light

cropped image

Looner Mission

  Up until this morning my one day record for Common Loons flying over my yard was 11.  This morning I had that by 7:05 AM and proceeded to get 24 more before 10 o'clock.  The 35 loons were more than I had ever counted for an entire spring.  Previous record was 30 in 2011.  They flew over as singles, pairs and a group each of 4,5 and 6.

5 of the group of 6

Close-up of birds in the previous photo.

4 of the group of 5

Close-up of above birds

  If you read my previous post about the four flight paths that the Loons take over my yard,  32 of the 35 were on either path B or C.  Paths A and D had one each and the remaining bird was heading north to south in a reverse migration direction.

   I've had a few decent birds on the ground in my yard over the past few days

Brown  Thrasher

   I see Mallards fly over quite often but this is only the second time one has landed.

Common Loon on Saturday

 Either a Melanistic or filthy House Sparrow

Chipping Sparrow

Hermit Thrush

  Back on April 18, I saw the disk of the Sun veiled behind a thin spot in the heavy overcast.  I knew its surface was loaded with sunspots so I took a few photos to try to capture them.

   Here is an image that appeared on spaceweather.com's website that day.  It was taken from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory with the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager.  The Observatory is in orbit around the Earth.

Moonrise at dawn on Sunday