This eclipse has some interesting story lines attached…. weather was our big question mark? All the theories and planning that went into this event had us plan to be in Texas for the eclipse, only to see the weather there turn into a thunderstormy cold front situation. Up here in New England, the weather looked to be clearing out, a true mystery for New Hampshire in the spring. We cancelled our flight plans for Texas, and decided we were going to head up to Vermont. The weather charts of the night prior, showed a warm front slowly making its way into western Vermont by eclipse day. With every passing new report, it became apparent that the place to be was going to be northern most New Hampshire, or some spots in Maine which were a bit more challenging to drive to and had less time in totality. New Hampshire’s Coos County was the answer, so we headed up that way first thing in the morning.
Right on the centerline was the town of Pittsburg, NH. Some of the NH Astronomical Society members had already planned to to be there and had rented out a cabin or two… they even invited us to join their observing group, so we headed to the town. Entering town there is a little stretch of road that passes by Lake Francis with a rocky shore and a fine open vista to the south. Some cars were already there at 8am waiting all day for the event. As we drove by, I made note of that spot… Arriving at the cabins, it was going to be a tough spot to work from, as they were surrounded by high pine trees. There was no easy field to access there, so we headed back towards the lake, and a good thing! The parking lot was filling rapidly…. and really couldn’t hold more than 50 cars or so. We parked along the edge of the boat ramp, and were confronted by an irate local who insisted that we couldn’t park there, otherwise how would boats get in and out? I kindly showed him that the whole lake (thousands of acres of lake) was covered in ice and snow…. No boats today. The gent started mumbling to himself and walked off head down.
We scoped out a nice spot on the rocky shore on a little triangle of land that jutted out and gave an unobstructed view towards the Sun at eclipse time. From this vantage, the shore and people would not be in the way. It was also conveniently next to a boulder which would make a nice perch for equipment, or elbows for binocular observing. We set up there, cameras, tripods, chairs, blankets (it was freezing), snacks and sunscreen. All we had to do was wait and be friendly to those showing up. Maybe a couple of hundred people were there by eclipse time, but we barely interacted with anyone except a group that insisted on playing their music loudly on their speaker system… really? When surrounded by nature?? Making that point was a bald eagle flying across the lake: a sight to enjoy and remember.
While setting up, we had to continually remind ourselves of the irony of the situation: NH? Spring? Clear skies? It is unheard of. While mumbling about that, I was scanning the shore, and while walking around the boulder, saw the back of the head of Jim DiCarlo and next to him David Gulick from PEA! What were the odds of finding two other PEA physics teachers by a lakeside in NH for an eclipse without prior planning?! Jim’s comment (after surprise at the meeting) was “Well, we must be in the right place to see the eclipse! John Blackwell’s here!” flashing his big smile. From that point on, surrounding folk caught on that we were all physics people and started to enjoy asking questions about astronomy and eclipses: outreach plans achieved!
We curled into chairs and blankets and caught up as a family, pup included, watching the Sun rise and counting down to the eclipse’s first contact. With eclipse glasses we could see some sunspots. We watched birds (my first pine siskin, by the way, thanks to David who heard it in a nearby tree). Dave and Jim started to grade papers (always a teacher’s duty) hanging around the rocks and staying out of the morning breeze.
For the eclipse, I had brought to tripod-mounted cameras, one with a wide field lens and the other with a 500mm telephoto. Both had solar filters for the partial eclipse moments (to be torn off at totality). Tracking for a total eclipse is not really required at these shorter focal lengths and high shutter speeds. My plan was to get the intervalometer running on the 500mm lens system taking rapid fire series of the eclipse at different exposure times to get HDR data for later stacking. The wide field camera was to take sweeping vista images and to see if we could also see shadow bands. People had seen them when we were out at Wyoming in 2017, but we didn’t catch them at all. Maybe this time? The lake was all covered in white snow, so an ideal location.
With first contact: a ton of excitement! This was really going to happen! We had knowledge that it would, of course, but that feeling of seeing then makes for a real deep believing, no matter how much one is a scientist. From there the excitement increased as things progressed. Shadows became more well defined as the amount of the Sun’s photosphere was made smaller and smaller. David brought out a neat little pinhole projector sheet (PEA written on it) so that we could see the crescents being projected. We all enjoyed views through the eclipse glasses and filtered optics. Right before totality, I ripped off the filters from the two cameras to get images of the diamond ring effect, and noticed shadow bands on the frozen lake surface. Some people were taking video of that, but we found it really hard to see them in the resulting frames. They are real, and they are really hard to see in photos.
Totality was awe inspiring, as it usually is. With perfectly clear skies we saw a very bright and very red prominence on the lower limb of the Sun. It was actually too bright to look at directly. Images brought this out quite clearly. The corona was vast reaching out several Sun diameters. Jupiter and Venus were easily visible to the eye. People were yelling, “ooooh”ing and “aaahhh”ing. It was joyous in the twilight. I set the telephoto camera system to image to its heart’s content and we got hundreds of frames of various exposure lengths. The results speak for themselves.
Wrapping up: we decided the better part of the planning was to leave before the eclipse really ended altogether. Many stayed to watch the full progress until final contact, but we had hours to go, and there were thousands of people in the region trying to get back to points south. We opted to go south to Route 3 to 110 to 16 to home…. It was likely the best way, but the traffic…. oh the traffic! In Berlin, we sat for hours….. waiting just to get through the town. Once at Gorham, things sped up nicely, making our way through Conway then to home. Conway at 2:00am is a very quiet place. Very. A great trip? ABSOLUTELY!