Eclipse 2019 at Vicuna, Northern Chile

"Show us your eclipse photos," asked many friends. "Why bother," some would say, "They all look alike."  Which is true if one looks at the standard photos, especially those shot with a hand-held point and shoot camera. Such as this one from my 2019 collection of photos.

Image 1 - Corona 2019 eclipse

Image 1 is of course a photo of the moon in front of the sun. The brighter region around the sun is its corona, the gaseous atmosphere, not normally visible because of the concentrated brightness of the sun's surface, but is visible during eclipses, when the bright surface of the sun is blocked by the moon. Interestingly though, the corona is actually hotter than the sun's surface, but being less dense, appears less bright.

Most photographs of the corona look more or less the same, eclipse after eclipse. The amount of the corona visible do vary and but that is partly dependent on the camera's exposure settings..

It is a quirky fact of images that an underexposed photo contains much information that can be recovered by "photoshop", The corona in Image 1 was in fact revealed by "photoshoping" an image such as this.

Image 2 -2019 eclipse

I deliberately  set my exposure low enough so that the corona's brightness did not blank out the more subtle features near the sun's surface - the reddish prominences visible now at six o'clock and 9 o'clock. These are hot plasma gases that erupt and are looped back by the sun's strong magnetic fields.

Compare Image 2 with Image 3, one that I photographed in the USA 2017 eclipse viewed from Madras in Oregon. The prominences were quite different in 2017.

Image 3 - 2017 eclipse

Features of the sun that are of interests to me include the Bailey beads which are spots of sunlight broken up by the irregular surface of the moon.  These are visible in the few seconds before Totality

Image 4 -Bailey beads at the beginning of Totality

and just after the end of Totality - Image 5.

Image 5 - Bailey beads at the end of Totality

And of course, we all like the arguably prettiest part of eclipse observations, the Diamond Ring

Image 6 - Diamond ring, 2019 eclipse