08/21/2026
Sometimes you don't get the sky you hoped for. You photograph the one you've got.
Nine years ago today, I was in Franklin, North Carolina, in the path of totality for the Great American Eclipse of August 21, 2017. And, as sometimes happens when you've planned to photograph a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event, there were clouds.
At the time, I desperately wanted them to get out of the way. Looking back at these images nine years later, I'm not so sure I would change anything.
These three photographs were made during the roughly two minutes of totality, at exposures of 1 second, 0.3 seconds, and 1/13 of a second. As the clouds moved across the eclipsed Sun, each exposure caught something different.
The longer exposures pulled out the Sun's ethereal corona through the clouds. The shortest froze tiny pink solar prominences along the edge of the Moon - enormous structures of glowing plasma that, from 93 million miles away, appear as little flecks of red.
And there is one more detail I'd never really appreciated: look above and to the right of the eclipsed Sun in the darkest image. That tiny point of light is Regulus, the brightest star in Leo. By sheer coincidence, it was only a few apparent solar diameters from the Sun that day. For a moment, totality - and a fortunate break in the clouds - allowed my camera to photograph a star in the middle of the afternoon.
Nine years later, I think the clouds are what make these photographs special.
