Eclipse Photos!

Sorry for no pathology content on Monday, but a once in a lifetime opportunity to share

First of all, why did I care so much about the 2024 North American total eclipse? Eclipses happen all the time, right? First of all, they don’t occur that often and when they do the path of totality may be in uninhabited areas or over the ocean. So to have it passing directly over where I live was a rare occurrence (I was smack in the middle of the path of totality). I’ve had bad luck with eclipses (in terms of being able to see them) in the two in my life that occurred prior to April 8, 2024.

May 30, 1984 (yes, friends, I am that old): This was an annular eclipse and I tried to build one of those eclipse viewers with a cereal box, but frankly I was underwhelmed. It didn’t seem to work that well, and I was just a little dude at the time…but even back then they warned us so much about going blind, so I wasn’t going to risk looking up (which is a good thing, since my vision is paramount to being a pathologist).

August 21, 2017: This was a more prominent partial eclipse for my area, and I was excited to see it BUT I was in court that day (testifying for a homicide trial!), scheduled to be out by the time the eclipse started but as often happens in the legal world, my testimony got pushed back a few hours and I missed it completely!

But here is what I saw yesterday afternoon in a park near where I live in central Indiana:

As it began, I was trying to 1) not burn my retinas 2) trying to use the camera filter and the Solar Snap app, and did not get great photos as it was developing:

Suffice it to say, the app worked much better in TOTALITY phase:

You can really appreciate the sun’s corona in these photos. An absolutely amazing experience to see totality develop. It got dark very quickly, the birds began chirping like it was 6 am and the temperature dropped about 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of seconds. Totality lasted about 4 minutes and we were able to see Venus and Jupiter, as well as this 360 degree “sunset effect” in all directions:

I love earth-space science and the natural world. As a career, I have of course chosen the biomedical sciences, but I appreciate all the wonders of nature. I enjoyed the experience so much, I’m not ruling out going to Madrid to see the 2026 total eclipse…

More pathology coming this week! I’ve already chosen some neat photos.

—DLW