The lesson learned from the April 8 total solar eclipse: follow Marcy! That’s Marcy Cohen, a friend from the New York Amateur Astronomers Association (AAA).

With a vigilant eye on a weather/cloud app, she insisted we go to Sherbrooke, Quebec from Watertown, New York to view the eclipse. This was on April 7. She was right. It was her first total eclipse and she was determined to see it, so we followed.

You may remember from a previous post that my plan was to be in Fredericksburg, Texas with my friend Rush at a campground. We had prepared a year in advance for this and were both looking forward to the experience.

Marcy also had Texas plans with her friend Keith, but weather forecasts showed clouds in Texas and clear skies in parts of the Northeast. We decided to meet in Watertown instead, 1,845 miles and 180 degrees from the original location.

Our friend John, also from the AAA, was also in Watertown with his family, having changed from Niagara Falls. We spend Sunday scouting out locations in nearby Cape Vincent, then testing our equipment under a brilliantly clear and sunny sky.

But as it turned out, you needed to get even farther east to really be under a clear sky. Ventusky, a really great cloud app, was showing parts of Quebec to be clear the afternoon of April 8. And Sherbrooke was only a 4 ½ hour drive for us.

John couldn’t go to Quebec with his family and made plans to head to Vermont. Luckily, Marcy and I had talked before the trip about bringing our passports in case we traveled to Canada. We set out just before 6:00 am on eclipse morning.

Keith found a nice B&B, Auberge de la Tour et Spa, in Magog, a suburb of Sherbrooke. The prices were not outrageous. We headed there first. The proprietor was excited about the eclipse; she was going to view it from a nearby mountain top. On a local map, she pointed us towards a small park along Lake Memphremagog, which happened to be a 9-minute drive from the Auberge.

This was around 11:30 am. We wanted to get set up in the park before the 2:16 pm start of the eclipse, so we skipped lunch and survived on our snacks. Marcy reported she saw people with baguettes and croissants along the beach. We wondered why we didn’t have any.

The beach turned out to be a beautiful location to watch an eclipse. There were a few hundred people there, enough to make it festive but not overcrowded. Excitement grew as the crowd saw, through their eclipse glasses, the moon taking bigger “bites” out of the sun. A cheer went up as the moon was almost covering the sun, then another cheer as totality was reached.

I’m always struck by how quickly the light goes—like a light switch is turned off. Suddenly, we were in near darkness, similar to a dark twilight. It was an unreal sight to see the eclipsed sun hanging in the dark sky above us. The temperature had been dropping in the last 10 to 15 minutes before totality and it felt cold. During a total eclipse, the sky along the horizon appears orange like a sunrise or sunset. I looked out onto the lake and the water was as orange as fire.

As we looked up to the solar corona, we could see a bright red spot near the 7:00 position. Keith loaned me his binoculars to take a closer look. We had no idea what it was, but it looked quite eerie. Later we found out it was a very bright solar prominence of plasma that extended out from the solar and lunar disks.

The moon receded off the face of the sun and some thin clouds appeared near the end of the eclipse. I hurried back to the Auberge to send some pictures out to my former employer, Agence France-Presse. We had a toast with sake (brought by Marcy, another reason to follow her on trips!) Then a celebratory dinner in town for the eclipse and for Keith, whose birthday is also April 8.  

I posted photos on the home page, and was fortunate to have my favorite photo selected for NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day for April 9.

Below is an amazing view from the International Space Station of the moon’s shadow over Quebec and Maine. We’re in the picture!

Aloha all! It’s been a whirlwind trip on Maui so far. The greatest part of this trip is my sister Maya met up with Ann and me and our good friends Jon and Amy from the Bay Area came for the show and to see the island.

The exhibit is beautifully presented in the Schaefer International Gallery at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center thanks to Neida Bangerter, Jonathan Clark, Adam and others. The large space was divided into two large spaces, one for the Haleakala photos, one for the other national parks. Lots of space for people to move around and look at the photos. It’s so great to see the photos up on the wall.

There was a very nice opening reception for the exhibit Saturday evening. I was presented with three beautiful leis- a very long one made from tea leaves from our friend Amy, an incredible one from Neida and the gallery and one of interlocking paper from Barbara, a docent at the MACC and a member of the local Buddhist Temple.

I did three gallery talks so far. A day before the opening I spoke with the gallery volunteers about the work. They were all curious and asked many questions. I did a short talk during the opening reception. On Sunday I teamed up with Haleakala National Park ranger Theresa Fernandez who provided really moving Hawaiian stories and words for what people were seeing in the photos. 

Aloha everyone, Ann and I are headed to Maui for the exhibit of my night sky photos, Infinite Night, at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center. Mahalo to Schaefer Gallery director Neida Bangerter for sticking with the idea over the last 3 years and a couple of pandemic postponements. Thanks to the talented staff at the gallery for producing this really nice evite/poster for the Infinite Night exhibit. The show will feature mostly work from Haleakala National Park and my 2019 residency there. Also to be shown will be work from Arches, Chaco Culture, Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain and Yellowstone National Parks.

Thanks to County of Maui, Hawaii Tourism Authority, Haleakala Conservancy and Hawaii Pacific Parks for your support!

All the printing is finally done for the Maui exhibit! I inspected and signed the giant prints produced by Laumont Studio in Long Island City, Queens, on Tuesday.

They really look great in person, although it’s hard to get across the scale in these blog photos. A big thanks to Kristen in the UV/Pigment department, who guided me through this project and all the various proposals since 2019. Three panorama images taken at Haleakala National Park were printed on a fine weave linen, 95 inches wide (almost 8 feet). These are the biggest prints in the exhibit, by far the largest I’ve done from any image. Painters use this linen as a canvas to show really fine detail. After the surface is finished with gesso, Laumont can print an image on the white surface. The pliable linen allows the lab to roll up the finished prints around a large tube and suspend that in a large box for shipping. The Schaefer Gallery in Maui will attach the big linen prints directly to the walls. I can’t wait to see them displayed!

(Thanks to my former AFP boss Don Emmert for taking the photos; he joined me at the lab with his daughter Samantha).