The 2024 Eclipse in Potsdam, New York
The 2017 total eclipse in Nebraska (full writeup and pictures here) was a profound and moving experience. While seeing a partial eclipse is interesting, being in the totality is hard to describe to those who haven’t experienced it. In the totality, you have a chance to see the corona, and crazy stuff happens. The light is surreal and indescribable and nothing make sense. Animals can freak out. Thin clouds can evaporate. The temperature drops and the wind can change direction. It’s unbelievable and crazy and unlike anything else. I’ve seen probably a dozen tornadoes and an erupting volcano, and I would put eclipse totality into that category of experience. I wrote about the 2017 experience in Nebraska, “It's hard to describe how emotional the experience of the totality was. I got chills down my back (and not from the temperature drop). We were stuttering around and couldn't really form sentences other than "wow" and, "LOOK AT THAT!!!" (I say pretty much the same thing watching tornadoes). It was the fastest two minutes and 33 seconds any of us had ever spent.”
After that awesome experience in 2017, I vowed to be in the totality of the next one, so, in April 2023, I booked a room in San Antonio, Texas, which had the lowest average cloud probability along the path (and the longest totality). And then—along with some local NY-based storm chasers—I booked a backup room in Watertown, NY. As the eclipse approached, the cloud situation in Texas looked worse and worse, along with the traffic probability, so after booking flights to meet friends down there, I bailed and went for the backup plan in upstate NY, and I’m glad I did.
The one thing that can ruin an eclipse is clouds. And for the days leading up to April 8, the models for Watertown trended from from pretty good (clear) conditions to pretty bad. But by this point, hotels everywhere along the totality path were sold out, so—unless you want to sleep in your car or are willing to sit in 50 mile traffic back ups—we were more or less committed to Watertown. And on the 7th, the day before the eclipse, I had a nice drive, got into town, scoped out the area for some potential viewing spots, and had a nice dinner with Scott McPartland and Dave Lewison and their families. As storm chasers, we are used to uncertainty and making tough decisions, but we are used to chasing small, unpredictable cumulonimbus (storm) clouds. And I think we all (along with many other chaser friends we were messaging with) found this situation to be particularly stressful, since while we knew exactly where the moon’s shadow was going to be and when, we really had no idea of what the clouds were going to do.
Of course the day before (and day after) it was perfectly clear, but on eclipse day there were high clouds and we could see on the satellite an ever-thickening cloud deck moving in from the west. I learned in 2017 that it’s pretty hard to move out of the shadow of high clouds (short of driving 200 miles through traffic jams to Vermont). But we eventually decided to head 90 minutes or so east to Potsdam to avoid the heaviest clouds as they were approaching. Traffic in this rural area (far from any metro) turned out not to be a problem (perhaps due to the cloud forecast?) and we found a school with a playground for Dave’s daughter. While I thought of heading further east, I decided to stick with the group, and this was a great decision since it was a great crew. Clouds got worse and worse as we approached totality (click any photo to enlarge).
However, seeing the partially-eclipsed sun was no problem through the increasing clouds (you can see the photos get softer going forward in time). There were a couple pretty prominent sunspots visible as well, which is always cool to see (click any photo to enlarge).
Dave’s family had brought along some cool science experiments to do, and I also saw about a 10 degree temperature drop on my little Kestrel weather sensor as we approached totality.
And then, the moment of truth.
By the time of totality, the clouds had gotten pretty thick, and we were really not sure what we were going to see.
But the sun with its corona popped right through the clouds!
Through the big lens it looked amazing (NIKKOR Z 180-600mm f/5.6-6.3 VR on my Z8)
It was absolutely stunning and surreal—in many ways even more surreal than the relatively clear skies we had in Nebraska in 2017. And like Nebraska, I planned not to concentrate on photography but instead experience the moment. And this led to me forgetting to take off my teleconverter before the totality, which caused for a bit of panicked reconfiguration of my camera.
Scott captured a fantastic video of the moment of totality (and you can hear my little eclipse timer app counting down—it was amazingly accurate). Scott has seen probably literally 100+ tornadoes and hurricanes and all kinds of stuff, but this was his first eclipse. And you can hear how it impacted him in this video (totality around 50 seconds in). You can hear me cursing as well.
You don’t need eclipse glasses during the totality, and we all noticed some bright red protuberances from the sun. Dave pointed out that they were “prominences”, and researching later it seems these are like 10-20 times the size of the earth. They got really noticeable right at the end of totality (and thanks to Topaz processing for rescuing this photo from me knocking the camera slightly out of focus—I had the focus ring taped, but apparently not enough).
One of the things that’s really hard to explain is how weird the 360 degree sunset is (this is looking back away from the sun):
Dave caught some fantastic time lapses in every direction and great drone video as well:
And then, after three minutes that seemed to go by in a heartbeat, the totality ended with a spectacular “diamond ring” effect.
One advantage of the heavy cloud cover was that we could see the moon shadow approach and depart (it moves really fast). Here’s a timelapse:
I often talk about how incredible this experience is, but here’s some data—my heart rate. The first peak is when I was out exploring Watertown on my bike, and riding up some pretty significant hills. The second peak is the nerve-wracking approach of clouds, and then then the totality.
Here’s the data for our location:
http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/
Once again, being in the totality was a profound experience. See you in Iceland or Spain in 2026?
