Spring Color on the Upland Trail

 

 

After decades of visiting the Indiana Dunes National Park (and lakeshore prior to 2019), I came across a trail I have not hiked. I don't know how this one was overlooked, but as soon as I realized, I had to check it out. 

The Upland Trail in Pinhook Bog is a 2 mile, lollipop trail that travels the highlands next to Pinhook Bog, a quaking bog closed to visitors except during scheduled tours. The term lollipop trail comes from the shape of the trail, a single trail in and out, with a loop at the end, so from overhead, it looks like a lollipop and a stick.

Some of the more interesting features of this trail were the diversity of environment and plant life. From meadows, to woodlands, including stands of beech trees and pines, wetlands, creeks and lakes, a bit of everything.

 

The early afternoon sun illuminated the light green buds and yellow flowers in the meadow, against an interesting sky. The yellow spring flowers dotting the meadow are Groundsel or sometimes called Ragwort.  The forecast called from clouds and possible rain, but we experienced some beautiful sunny periods when it counted. 

For a small and quite remote trail, the Pinhook Bog Upland trail was filled with quite a bit of activity. Aside from the families hiking, quite a few individuals were hiking with hand held baskets- it is Morel mushroom season, and my guess is they're out to find mushrooms in the beech forest. I asked one person carrying an Easter basket if she had any luck finding mushrooms, she replied, "I'm just out for a nice walk." Mmm hmm, a nice walk holding an Easter basket. Of course, picking mushrooms at the national park is illegal, so what else could she have said?

Totality

 

Totality seemed to happen in a second, even the 1% of sunlight was enough to illuminate the environment - dim and oddly colored, but still bright. Once totality took place, everyone removed their eclipse glasses and enjoyed the view. I concentrated on bracketing the sun's corona, taking numerous photos at different exposures to capture the different elements of the phenomenon. 

We only had four minutes to view, adjust, adapt, and capture images, but I also wanted to take in the experience with my eye out of the viewfinder. In addition, I wanted to capture the environment around me during totality, so I brought along an older camera to do just that, without the need to change lenses and settings on my Z8. Attempting to match the light as I experienced it, is not as easy as it seems. Shooting manual exposure, I can adjust the camera to take a photo during the eclipse that would be as bright as a normal day, so I kept the settings the same as the images I captured around the yard prior to totality. That, I think, gives a correct impression of just how dark things were. 

It's amazing how small the sun appears when it's covered by the moon- all that radiation spreads out and tricks our eyes and makes it appear huge. It's really about the size of the full moon, and that's a very interesting coincidence for those of us on earth. If the moon was smaller, or the sun was closer, we would never had a total eclipse, the moon would transit across the sun and that's about it. If the moon was larger, we would have an eclipse, but the sun's corona would be obscured during most of the event. So, we're quite lucky to have these bodies as they are, so during syzygy (the alignment of the earth, moon, and sun), the moon covers the sun almost perfectly, and the moon creates the dark shadow on the earth called the umbra. 

It's a shame eclipses don't last longer, and they don't happen more often. I suppose if they did, we'd take them for granted instead of traveling hours to gaze at them in awe.

The Dune Ridge Trail in Spring

 

 

Things are waking up quickly around the Indiana Dunes National Park. Taking a quick hike up the short Dune Ridge Trail near Kemil Beach revealed quite a bit of "greening up" along the dune and especially down in the Great Marsh. The Great Marsh is a wetland running parallel to the Lake Michigan shore, on the leeward side of the aft dunes. This 15 mile long by 1/4 mile wide wetland was once all marsh, but since the 1900's, it's been drained in spots for houses, farmland, and industry.

 
Restoration of this wetland began back in the 1990s, and evidence of this still exists with thousands of tree stumps in the water. The trees were killed either by girdling (cutting around the circumference of the trunk) or by flooding after drains were removed. Either way, more and more of the Great Marsh is being restored every year. 

A road once cut through a good portion of this marsh, but flooding ruined it, and the park closed the road about 8 years ago. This road is now part of a new trail system that takes visitors between the aft dune and the edge of the marsh. The road can be seen in the distance in the photo above.

   

The relatively short and simple trail up the dune is called the Dune Ridge Trail, and at this early time of the year, I was surprised to see lupine blooming. I expected them to bloom a few weeks from now, but with the warmer weather, and the sun heating the sand, they're all ready to go. Soon, the Tolleston Dune Trail will have areas of lupine seemingly acres wide, running along the trails, into the woods, and up the dunes. It's a beautiful thing to see. 

Later in the early summer, the prickly pear cacti will bloom as well. Now is a great time to get out to these trails to see what is blooming this week. It's interesting to see how things change so quickly in the spring, and even more interesting to see how these areas change with each season, with each month, and even with each week.

The Phases of the 2024 Total Eclipse

 

The many phases of the eclipse in a composite of 19 images taken from first contact through last contact. Looking at the timeline below, you can see there are only about 5 seconds between some events, such as the diamond ring and Baily's beads, and totality, so there's little time to react and change camera settings.

The timeline of the eclipse:

01:50:22   The edge of the moon begins to block a portion of the sun 

02:13   20% obscuration 

02:20   Temperatures begin to change 

02:35   The sky begins to darken 

03:05:33   The corona appears 

03:05:43   Diamond ring 

03:05:48   Baily's beads 

03:05:53   Totality begins 

03:09:55   Totality ends 

03:09:56   Baily's beads 

03:10:00   Diamond ring 

03:32   Temperatures return to normal 

04:01   20% obscuration 

04:23:13   Eclipse ends

Solar Prominences

So many events happen during the brief solar eclipse, it's almost impossible to experience them all, and even more difficult to photograph them all. Camera settings and equipment can be very different for each phase, and some phases only last a matter of seconds. In the case of the sun's chromosphere, this took place at 3:05 and 54 seconds, and ended at 3:05 and 55 seconds - yes, one second! One second to assess, adjust, and execute. Well, I may or may not have captured this one second event, but in this photo, solar prominences are visible along with the bright red color of burning hydrogen.

These prominences are loops of hydrogen plasma from the sun's surface up into it's atmosphere, and these are actually larger than the earth, extending hundreds of thousands of miles away from the surface. According to the Holcolm Observatory, the one in the top photo measures three times the diameter of earth!

Generally, one needs to use special equipment to see these effects, often including a hydrogen-alpha filter that captures the wavelength of light these give off. Hydrogen-alpha filters are very expensive (I wanted to use one for the eclipse phases until I priced them), so I waited for nature to do the work for me. During totality and a few moments prior and after, solar prominences are visible without the aid of special filters. There was plenty of activity on April 8, 2024, so the eclipse did not disappoint. 

Following totality, a large prominence was visible near the south pole of the sun. Looking a lot like a tongue of fire, the plasma loop stood out against the black surface of the moon, and the blackness of space. 

   

Here, Baily's beads were just finishing up, and a bit of the sun's chromosphere is visible - the thin, bright red outline around the moon.
Once again, photography has persuaded me perform a deep-dive into a subject to find out more and more about the things I've seen behind the camera.

The Corona and the Chromosphere

 

In an attempt to pull any amount of detail from the dark moon, and bring out as much of the captured corona as possible, the image above resulted. A very small bit of detail can be seen of the moon's surface, lots of grain, but it's there. The sun's chromosphere can be seen at the bottom of the moon, reflecting red off of the surface - that's the hydrogen burning. This phenomenon is only visible for about five seconds at the very end of totality, right before Baily's beads.

This image was created using the 10 image stack from the previous post, and a new one with the chromosphere. This 11 image stack shows just how far the corona extends. According to NASA, the corona extends five million miles above the sun's surface. That's over five times the diameter of the sun.

The Sun's Corona and Diamond Ring

 

 

I spent a few days in suburban Indianapolis, Indiana to make certain I would be around to view the total eclipse of 2024. Back in 2017, I was working, and didn't make the trip south for that particular eclipse, and vowed I would not miss this one. 

Almost a year ago, I began planning, and several months ago, I put in for vacation to make sure there was nothing keeping me from seeing this event - except perhaps the weather. Hearing how horrible the traffic could be, I decided to head down a few days early, and stay at least another day. I did luck out in the traffic department, while everyone else was sitting in traffic heading northbound on I-65, I was either relaxing in my nephew's yard, or on Tuesday, driving down some farm roads west and north - I suppose these roads weren't GPS detours for traffic because they were almost empty. I-65 was backed up in several places throughout the day, and I'd probably still be sitting in traffic if I took that route. 

The weather forecast for two weeks mentioned cloud cover, and even on the morning of the eclipse, there was a 25% cloud cover forecast - while I looked up and saw very few clouds if any. We lucked out and had a relatively clear sky, with some very high, light haze which did mess a bit with the bright tones on the photos, but it didn't destroy them. 

I met some family and some friends - old and new - for the event, right in my nephew's large back yard. His BBQ dinner was excellent by the way. We all set up and waited for syzygy - the alignment of earth, the moon, and the sun. All the while taking photos of the different phases of the eclipse using a Baader filter on my 600mm lens (any closer and the corona will be cut off). Even this part of the event was excellent - and I've seen a few partial eclipses, but once the moon covered the sun, the fast darkness took hold and it was spectacular.

I planned on bracketing several exposures during totality, to obtain the best range of exposures of the rays of the sun's corona. I used 10 separate images for the photograph above, all aligned and stacked together to form an average of exposures to create one image showing the extent of the corona. 

The image shared in the previous post was done from one image, and on an older laptop, so I was not happy with it at all once I saw it on a decent computer monitor. This one seems a bit better - if not, let me know!

   

 Just before totality - at 3:05 and 43 seconds, the diamond ring effect took place. This is when only a small bit of the sun peeks over the moon, creating a relatively small point of light, along with some light from the corona around the moon - this looks a lot like a ring, and the bright spot on top, looks like a diamond. This lasted for 4 seconds until the sun was all but covered completely. There isn't a lot of time to remove the Baader filter and re-adjust the camera, but I managed to get things done in time - a camera capable of taking 120 images a second really helps. 

I like this diamond ring image better than yesterday's as well. If you look around the top of the image, you can see lots of solar prominences - huge, bright plasma looping from the sun's surface into the sun's outer atmosphere.  These colorful, hydrogen formations are huge, sometimes larger than several earths combined - the largest on record was about to 500,000 miles across.  

When is the next eclipse? 2026 in Iceland I think. I'll start making plans now.

2024 Total Eclipse - First Impressions

 

 The first images of the total eclipse today, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Had to get these posted without doing any "real" editing. Most photos of the sun's extended corona are created by stacking multiple images in photoshop, but this image is just one photo. I used a computer with a poor display, and while the images looked fine to me on that display, I see they have some halo effects around them on any other monitor.  QUALITY DISPLAYS ARE IMPORTANT.

Click here to see similar images processed correctly

Experiencing a total eclipse was something to behold, something better seen in person than in photos and stories. While images can convey the look of the sun, they can't convey the odd lighting before and after totality, the strange shadows on the ground, the cool breeze, the seemingly instant darkness, and a 360 degree sunset look in the sky.

   

 Just before totality, some interesting effects are created by the moon. The first is the diamond ring effect, so called because the last light creates a bright spot on one end, while the edges of the moon are illuminated by the sun behind. It really does look like a diamond ring.

   

 The second effect occurs moments before totality, the last tiny bits of light shining through the mountains of the moon, creating what's called Baily's Beads, because it looks a lot like a string of beads. This effect only lasts for a few seconds, so it can be difficult to capture well.

   

 After totality, a second diamond ring is visible. While a bit overexposed, this one has a nice flare effect reaching out into space. One of the best parts of viewing the eclipse was to share it with others; what others notice you may not, what you notice, they may not, and sharing this information in the moment is really special.