A Skyful of Eclipse 2024

From the photographer: “I observed the total Solar eclipse of 8th April 2024 at a farm near Fox and Shirley, Arkansas, which lasted lasted 4 minutes 15 seconds.

One aspect about the total Solar eclipses I like very much is the dark blue sky surrounded by twilight colours all round the horizon and stars becoming visible. There is never enough time to look for the stars, so I try to do the next best thing, which is photographing all the sky and horizon.

To cover the whole sky, I first photograph the horizon containing the eclipsed Sun, taking 3 different exposures to record the varying light levels of the corona. Then I turn to other directions, and shoot 3 more pictures, covering the whole horizon. Last, I shot 2 more pictures of the higher sky around zenith, the panel containing the Sun might get 3 different exposures again. If there is time, I shoot the immediate foreground in four directions with an additional 4 pictures. Thankfully this total Solar eclipse had a much longer than average, exceeding 4 minutes. So, I was able to direct the camera and photograph the panorama including the immediate foreground shots, which adds up to 16 individual pictures. And, I had time to do many other things while the totality lasted, such as training binoculars on the total eclipse.

In this panorama, the southern horizon is at the bottom, east is to the left, north at top and west is to the right. The Sun was high due south during totality. Thanks to the Lunar shadow being larger than normal, the sky got dark enough to record four planets and many stars above at our location. Alternate image is the annotated version of this panorama, labeling the visible planets, some bright stars and also showing some constellation figure lines.”