I managed to be within the path of totality for a solar eclipse this time!
Last time, I wasn’t in the path, but this time I was. And this is what I saw:
Bummer. It was completely clear the day before and completely clear the following day, and even cleared up several hours after the eclipse was over – it just had to be very cloudy during the entire event. But it was fascinating to experience the Moon passing overhead. For a while, it was getting dark, but was hard to tell if it was because of the clouds, or the Moon. But then you could see it getting darker by the second – you could even feel it getting darker! The temperature dropped noticeably, the sounds changed, and a sense of something large LOOMING over you came about. The clouds ominously looking similar to the clouds from Independence Day just before the giant spaceship emerges certainly helped make the event feel unsettling.
While the clouds made the event a bit of a let-down, I also did a timelapse of the event. I dusted off my download script that gets images from weather satellites and modified it a bit to download from both the east and west satellites. I also reused some code from when I tracked a hurricane while using the latitude and longitude for the central line that the moon traced out during the eclipse – published in ‘Total Solar Eclipse of 2024 April 08’ by Fred Espenak and Jay Anderson. This turned into a tediously long Python script that assembled the images into this fancy video:
The east coast GeoColor images were downloaded from here, the west coast images were from here and also (as of this writing), NOAA has some timelapses of the event as well here. Music is the aptly named ‘New Moon’ by Jón Hallur. Because I only had 10 minute intervals between images, the eclipse just flies right by within 20-some frames, so I repeated it multiple times while running the video at a slow frame rate of 6 frames a second which is why it looks somewhat stiff in movement.
The script uses pillow to handle the images and ffmpeg to assemble them into a video – and ffmpeg can be frustrating to use at times. It’ll complain a million ways that you can’t do a thing, because it wasn’t in the order it expected but in the order you wanted, and then when you have it in order, and after it works the first time, it will decide to ignore what you want but then not complain. In this case, it turns out that a line in one of the input files is required to be there, but I took it out because it started with a comment character (thus meaning that line would be ignored) and no one ever said that line was necessary. Also figuring out how to do the video and what music to use and how many times to repeat and what views to try meant this video took a few days to put together. But I think it turned out alright.
Orthallelous 
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