2024 Eclipse

There has been a fairly long gap in solar eclipses from the 2019 Chile eclipse. Travel to the 2020 Chile/Argentina eclipse was severely impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic, and the ’21 and ’23 eclipses in Antartica and northwest Australia were just too remote. So was looking forward to the “Next Great American Eclipse.” The roughly five year hiatus also provided ample time for me to upgrade my photo rig from its catastrophic electronics meltdown in the 2019 eclipse. As an added bonus, we would have an annular eclipse in October of 2023 that would pass directly through the Albuquerque area, which provided an opportunity to check out the new system. Annular eclipses are not particularly photogenic, but did manage to put together a good “string of pearls” image.

The plan for the 2024 eclipse was to visit the daughter and son-in-law in San Antonio, Texas, which presented some of the best weather prospects in the U.S. But, there’s the climate and there’s the weather, and weather prospects in southern Texas started to look pretty dim. Unfortunately, the weather forcast was never totally horrible, and there didn’t seem to be any weather guarantees anywhere along the path. (Except for New England, which would have been an epic, expensive trip, if it could even be arranged at the last minute.)

So, with some chance of seeing the eclipse, we headed up from San Antonio to Fredericksburg, which was pretty much on the centerline. It was drizzling a little bit on the way up, but the sky broke into patchy clouds as the morning went on, teasing us with some hope for totality. Things actually started to look good as the partial phases started…

… but, the cloud layer started to deepen, although there were some brief breaks. At any rate, things were pretty dismal at totality, except for a few moments. Here’s a quick, edited look at totality from Fredericksburg:

Although the moments were brief, thanks to modern digital imaging, managed to get a few good images…