Yesterday, October 14th, was Annular Eclipse Day for astrophysicists and astrophiles alike, while the bulk of us experienced it as Neato Eclipse Day.

To the informed, it was a “ring of fire” eclipse, in which the sun would briefly be obscured by the moon moving in front of it for those sitting on its path of annularity. Fortunately for us in Albuquerque, the path of annularity would move over just two major cities in the U.S.- ours, and San Antonio- and so the annular eclipse would be in our backyard.

For me, the eclipse was in Tim’s backyard though, really. ‘Cause that is where I watched and photographed it from.

From 9:13 AM to 12:09 PM, the moon moved across the face of the sun, and in its period of annularity (of nearly 5 minutes, from 10:33 to 10:38 AM)- or when the moon sat fully within the outline of the sun- the “ring of fire” effect could be seen.

We were fortunate to have ideal weather for this sky show, and I sat out with Tim and his family and took pictures throughout the whole event as Tim tracked it through his telescope.

I put my camera on its tripod and fixed its settings (f/8, ISO 200, 1/500th a second exposure) after I loaded the 75-300mm (set at 300mm) lens up with 34 stops of ND filters, and my job then became to track the eclipse with it for the next three hours.

Perhaps the highlight of the event was eating some green chile cheese bread Tim’s wife Laurie provided. The Wagner’s chile in it was zesty.

The other memorable moment was tangibly feeling everything could down as the moon blocked the sun and light dimmed slightly in the annularity.

My results were good for what they were.

The Progression

Intro

The Annular Images

Outro

That’s it! Nothing extremely remarkable in these images- no sun flares, no alien spacecrafts, so lunar surface details. Bu hey- you can see a few sun spots that are shared across the images, which I know are sun spots and not dust motes on my lens because I had to move the camera around to keep up with the sun, and the spots wouldn’t remain in the same places on the face of the sun.

The extreme ND filtering pretty much flattened everything not the sun to black, so I got no corona around the sun due to any atmosphere. The lens I used was a kit lens, but it was fine for the show and it could accept the various 58mm filters I needed to use to stop down solar light. The 300mm telephoto lens still produced an image of the sun that basically looked like a quarter-sized dot on a black piece of typing paper. But the results from the photos were pretty consistent. And I can say I did it- which, I guess is something.

Tim has a giant lens he calls a bazooka that he was going use to take photos of the eclipse with, but when a required placement of a non-glass filter BETWEEN the lens and the camera body fried the filter, that approach was gone. It was a bummer for him in the moment, but also the source of a few chuckles and some awe at the appetite of the sun.

Well, that’s the word from the Annular Eclipse of 2023. Back to your regularly scheduled program.