Yesterday was the total solar eclipse, of course, and I hope if you were able to see it, especially along the narrow path of totality, you had clear skies! Not many did, looks like, with clouds being jerks.

It was clear for most of it here in Virginia, though it did get cloudy mid-eclipse. Honestly, though, it did give the view a lovely, moody feel to it:

Over the past month I’ve traveled to Indiana, Ohio (twice), Boston, and upstate New York to tell people about the wonderfulness of the eclipse, but I had to be home to watch it, where we only got about 80% of the Sun covered. Still, it was a lot of fun to watch the event slowly unfold, checking outside every few minutes to look.

I set up my solar telescope, which has a complicated filtering system that only lets an extremely narrow slice of red light through, centered on hydrogen-alpha, the wavelength of light (around 0.656 microns) that is emitted by warm hydrogen, which the Sun has in spades. This allows you to see a lot of amazing features that are usually swamped out by all the other colors of light.

Around the beginning of the eclipse I took this by holding my phonecam up to the eyepiece. Focusing is really hard this way, so it’s a bit fuzzy, but you can still see a lot. The weird mottling making it look like a shag carpet is real; those are the tops of huge towers of gas inside the Sun rising and falling, called convection towers. The long windy streamers are called filaments, and are seen in silhouette against the brighter face of the Sun. When they’re on the edge though we see them against the darkness of space so they look bright, and we called them prominences. Quite a few can be seen, including that big loopy one near the bottom.

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