Ring of Fire in the Sky
Portuguese photographer Rui Santos captured this shot of the recent solar eclipse.
Stunning. Here’s what makes this shot look a little different from other eclipse photos; from APOD:
Usually the solar corona appears white, and to some observers the corona of last week’s total solar eclipse did appear this pearly color. But this time, totality observers in Spain saw a corona that appeared unusually golden. For one reason, from Spain, the totality occurred when the setting Sun was near the horizon. That low, sunlight travels through a large amount of air which scatters out blue light. An unusual amount of smoke in the air from nearby forest fires acted as a second filter, further scattering the remaining blue tones and deepening the already gold-dominated light.
Comments 1
I saw this last week on an eclipse tour in the Rioja region of Spain. It was more orange than the other eclipse I've seen (in 2017) when the sky was more blue. The wildfire haze had an effect, as did the fact that it was low on the horizon. The photo above does a great job of showing the streamers, which looked more hazy to me than at the previous eclipse. The photo shows the start of the "diamond ring" as the sun starts to peek out from behind the moon. (There's also a diamond ring at the beginning, but they recommend you don't look or your eyes won't be adjusted for the rest of the eclipse.)
The partial eclipse sunset was stunning. At that point, tiny clouds floated in front of the sun and looked like sunspots.
You can't get pictures of an eclipse that show what it looks like to the human eye; the dynamic range is just too great. To show the streamers you overexpose the sun and underexpose the sky. The best photos in our group of what the eye sees came from my wife's iPhone 17 Pro, which algorithmically balanced the dynamic range, at the cost of looking very grainy, with completely washed-out streamers—and, of course, the sun is much smaller than you get with a telescopic lens like the one that shot this photo.
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