A week ago my family and I drove up to Oregon to view the total eclipse of 2017, and it was a transcendental experience for us. The sight of totality, the entire solar disk blotted out and the corona visible, is one of those rare events that manifests the scale of the universe and our own comparative smallness. But it's also worth remembering how far we've come: for millennia astronomers have been able to predict total eclipses, for centuries we've understood the physics behind them, and for decades we've been able to travel to the Moon itself. Progress seems painfully slow sometimes, but this sort of event is a reminder that it happens, and on an astronomical scale it's very rapid indeed. There will be solar eclipses for another 600 million years or so; going that far in our past would predate the Cambrian Explosion.
On that scale, the next eclipse that will cross the United States, on April 8, 2024, is coming almost immediately. But for us ephemeral humans, the 79-1/2 months between now and then is a long time to wait. It is not too long to prepare, though!
For the 2017 eclipse, we had dark glasses and a homemade pinhole viewer with a focal length of about 1m, producing a solar image about 1cm wide. But I had no special camera filter in place and as a result got no pictures of totality. We can do better, and we will. My plans for 2024 include: a proper camera filter (research needed to determine what is right for corona photography), a filter for my telescope, and a pinhole viewer with a 30m focal length (producing a 30cm image).
The purpose of this blog is to track my progress on this preparation, culminating (I hope!) with a very nice eclipse experience and images.
