Visible filament or prominence during eclipse

[cgrant26]

Just Got back to our hotel.from watching the total eclipse from Southern Illinois. Absolutely amazing experience! During totality there was a bright red filament loop or prominence visible to the naked eye. Pretty amazing to see.

I need to link up with some friends who had better camera gear to see if they captured images of it and ill share the pics here.

 

Best I got:

 

Edited April 8 by cgrant26

[Jim M]

Saw the same thing in Hot Springs, coming from the 6 o’clock side, straight down. Looked pinkish.

[hamateur 1953]

1 hour ago, cgrant26 said:

Just Got back to our hotel.from watching the total eclipse from Southern Illinois. Absolutely amazing experience! During totality there was a bright red filament loop or prominence visible to the naked eye. Pretty amazing to see.

I need to link up with some friends who had better camera gear to see if they captured images of it and ill share the pics here.

 

Best I got:

 

Awesome dude!!  Thank You for posting that!!

[Jay-B]

[cgrant26]

10 minutes ago, Jay-B said:

Awesome! 

One of my friends sent me this:

 

[Drax Spacex]

Jay-B's images match what I saw live.  The color of the prominences was indeed magenta.  I was expecting orange or red!  

[hamateur 1953]

Cool!!

7 minutes ago, Drax Spacex said:

Jay-B's images match what I saw live.  The color of the prominences was indeed magenta.  I was expecting orange or red!  

 

[cgrant26]

32 minutes ago, Drax Spacex said:

Jay-B's images match what I saw live.  The color of the prominences was indeed magenta.  I was expecting orange or red!  

It looked like a darker shade to my naked eye than what I see above but definitely more magenta than red.

[Jesterface23]

Only in the 94% this time around, all I could go for was sunspots. Region 3628.

[Drax Spacex]

My local newscasters and meteorologists are calling these red-magenta features flares.  I assume they are prominences, not flares - but I'm not sure.

Edited April 9 by Drax Spacex
unsure

[Veggi]

5 hours ago, Drax Spacex said:

Jay-B's images match what I saw live.  The color of the prominences was indeed magenta.  I was expecting orange or red!  

Can confirm the magenta. I was watching from eastern Canada and used some binoculars shortly after the beginning of totality and I agree with cgrant26 that the prominences were darker than in the photos.

What I saw with the binoculars did look much more like a prominence than a flare. (At least it seems that way after a few minutes of research about how to differentiate the two)

If only totality could last longer... I would have gotten a better look with the binoculars, but did not want to risk frying my retinas when totality ended.

[Philalethes]

10 hours ago, Drax Spacex said:

Jay-B's images match what I saw live.  The color of the prominences was indeed magenta.  I was expecting orange or red!  

10 hours ago, cgrant26 said:

It looked like a darker shade to my naked eye than what I see above but definitely more magenta than red.

4 hours ago, Veggi said:

Can confirm the magenta.

Interesting observations for sure, and I've seen a lot of photos and read a lot of accounts corroborating it. If I'm not mistaken you primarily get those hues from red mixed with a fair amount of blue and significantly less green. My first thought was that the preponderance of blue over green might be due to the atmosphere, at least twilight tends to look rather blue, and I've read that the atmosphere looks similar to something akin to civil or nautical twilight during a total eclipse.

However, from looking over some observations of the emission spectra of prominences and thinking a bit about it, I'm guessing it might actually be primarily from the other hydrogen lines in the Balmer series, which have been identified quite prominently (heh) in those spectra. For reference, these lines:

It would also make sense in terms of the relative intensity of the lines.

Not sure about what the exact cause is though, maybe it could be some of both contributing here, or maybe it's mostly one or the other. I did find an interesting thread about something similar here, arguing that nebulae primarily would look somewhat pink, magenta, or even purple, due to these emission lines of hydrogen, which could be similar to the situation here.

Do we have any imagery of prominences during a total eclipse as seen from outside of the atmosphere? I dug a little for it, but couldn't find anything, the vast majority of images seem to be taken from here on Earth, but maybe I just didn't look well enough. If the spectrum looks the same, then I would guess it's because it's actually emitting that way, whereas if it looks significantly less blue I would guess the atmosphere is having an impact. Maybe it would be possible to filter out the blue of the atmosphere from ground-based images too? Would be interested in thoughts on all this.

5 hours ago, Drax Spacex said:

My local newscasters and meteorologists are calling these red-magenta features flares.  I assume they are prominences, not flares - but I'm not sure.

4 hours ago, Veggi said:

What I saw with the binoculars did look much more like a prominence than a flare.

From looking at the images and descriptions I agree, they look like textbook prominences to me.

 

Edited April 9 by Philalethes
quote

[Christopher Shriver]

I had "The Weather Channel" up to observe people's reactions and what a mainstream channel had to say about it. Admittedly, meteorologist broadcasters are not astrophysicists, but even Dr. Paul Sutter was throwing "flare" and "solar storm" out to improperly describe the HSS; wisps of the corona that are flared out from an adjacent CH and/or trapped gasses within graduated, bowed-out CLs. "Parker spiral" was not mentioned, sadly.

[Drax Spacex]

Meteorologists should stick to the study of meteors 😆

[Calder]

This was the best I could do. I don’t own anything with a wide enough field of view to capture the entire corona. Just my iPhone and Orion XT8 telescope. The prominences were pretty cool to see.

 

I was able to see a little bit more detail in the prominences after some editing.

13 hours ago, Drax Spacex said:

My local newscasters and meteorologists are calling these red-magenta features flares.  I assume they are prominences, not flares - but I'm not sure.

They are certainly prominences. Many people around my area were incorrectly calling them flares too.

[Drax Spacex]

"2024 Triangle Prominence Total Eclipse"

The strangest part of totality was how much it looked like a black hole in the sky.  Everywhere else in the sky was a twilight blue-gray.  Even when a stray cloud passed over the Sun, still it was a black background.  I expected some atmospheric light scattering within the area of totality disk, but all I saw was a black hole.  It was eerie, weird, unintuitively unnatural, and absolutely amazing!

https://ibb.co/KXkQbR2

https://ibb.co/mB1QwMm

Edited April 10 by Drax Spacex
another image

[RajSim]

I was lucky to have witnessed this spectacle from Northeastern Vermont under clear skies. After following this great community for solar flares and aurora, watching the prominence, corona with naked eye was pure bliss. Words can't express the feeling. I tried my first eclipse photos with telephoto lens (600 mm). Here are the bailey's beads and prominence seconds before totality that I had captured.

[Drax Spacex]

6 hours ago, RajSim said:

I was lucky to have witnessed this spectacle from Northeastern Vermont under clear skies. After following this great community for solar flares and aurora, watching the prominence, corona with naked eye was pure bliss. Words can't express the feeling. I tried my first eclipse photos with telephoto lens (600 mm). Here are the bailey's beads and prominence seconds before totality that I had captured.

Nice!  Astronomy bonus:  Someone should overlay a calculated image of the moon at totality that matches the lunar peaks valleys corresponding to these bailey's beads - aligning like the pins of a combination lock. 

[hamateur 1953]

38 minutes ago, Drax Spacex said:

Nice!  Astronomy bonus:  Someone should overlay a calculated image of the moon at totality that matches the lunar peaks valleys corresponding to these bailey's beads - aligning like the pins of a combination lock. 

Great idea Drax!  Funny. All these years I had assumed ( erroneously) that the shadow bands I saw on the ground at my feet in 1979 were the surface irregularities themselves, not incidentally polarised light as they most likely were.  

[NEAurora]

On 4/9/2024 at 12:24 PM, Drax Spacex said:

Meteorologists should stick to the study of meteors 😆

but... but ... I'm a meteorologist! 

This eclipse was awesome, the prominence was clearly visible to the naked eye for most of totality, basically provided a diamond ring effect that lasted throughout totality.

[Philalethes]

9 hours ago, hamateur 1953 said:

Great idea Drax!  Funny. All these years I had assumed ( erroneously) that the shadow bands I saw on the ground at my feet in 1979 were the surface irregularities themselves, not incidentally polarised light as they most likely were.  

Doesn't have anything to do with polarization of the light, though; it's from the path the light takes constantly changing due to changes in refraction from turbulent air. Normally this wouldn't cause any detectable pattern from a source as bright as sunlight, since sufficient light to illuminate the ground or whatever other surface would be coming in at various angles simultaneously, but once the source becomes so small that the incoming light is practically collimated, the refraction will cause some areas to not get any light at all.

Most people have probably seen how distorted Sol can appear at sunrise, something like this:

This is essentially the same thing as stars twinkling, but since sunlight is so bright, you're still getting plenty of light wherever you're observing it from as long as enough of the disc is visible.

But now imagine the only visible part of the disc is a tiny sliver at the edge; in this case that sliver will seem to disappear and reappear as the light from that particular part of the disc gets refracted in ways that ends up either illuminating your eyes or not (the shadow bands would essentially be dancing across your face).

One would thus also expect that you could achieve something similar at sunrise and sunset under specific conditions, and as this page reports, precisely that seems to indeed be the case:

Quote

Some observers report shadow bands very similar to eclipse shadow bands occurring at sunrise or sunset behind mountain ridges or linear clouds. They share a similar geometry like solar eclipses. Good transparency and the presence of appropriate air turbulences seem to be conditions for the occurrence of such kinds of shadow bands.The distance to the ridge or the elevation above the horizon seem to be less important.

The necessity of air turbulence ("poor seeing") also explains quite well why the bands are seen more clearly during some eclipses than others, as seems to be reported by various people.

[cgrant26]

It's interesting that the shadow bands do follow a rectangular pattern and that they are longer the lower the inclination of the eclipse is. I suppose one may ask why they don't happen to the sides of buildings that face ocean sunsets every day but I'd expect that angles tangent to whatever layer of the atmosphere causes shadow bands probably prevent the effect or distort it beyond perception. That begs the question; are shadow bands still visible during eclipses that are at the horizon?

Sure would be interesting to try putting up a flat, white surface for an eclipse that appears on the horizon. Looks like there will be an opportunity in 2026 https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2026-august-12

Edited April 11 by cgrant26

[hamateur 1953]

Ok. I jumped to contusions again. Interesting.  Anyway whatever the cause, I know they were definitely NOT mountains or surface irregularities as I have assumed for some 45 years now!   Haha. Tnx @Philalethes. Mike 

6 hours ago, Philalethes said:

Doesn't have anything to do with polarization of the light, though; it's from the path the light takes constantly changing due to changes in refraction from turbulent air. Normally this wouldn't cause any detectable pattern from a source as bright as sunlight, since sufficient light to illuminate the ground or whatever other surface would be coming in at various angles simultaneously, but once the source becomes so small that the incoming light is practically collimated, the refraction will cause some areas to not get any light at all.

Most people have probably seen how distorted Sol can appear at sunrise, something like this:

This is essentially the same thing as stars twinkling, but since sunlight is so bright, you're still getting plenty of light wherever you're observing it from as long as enough of the disc is visible.

But now imagine the only visible part of the disc is a tiny sliver at the edge; in this case that sliver will seem to disappear and reappear as the light from that particular part of the disc gets refracted in ways that ends up either illuminating your eyes or not (the shadow bands would essentially be dancing across your face).

One would thus also expect that you could achieve something similar at sunrise and sunset under specific conditions, and as this page reports, precisely that seems to indeed be the case:

The necessity of air turbulence ("poor seeing") also explains quite well why the bands are seen more clearly during some eclipses than others, as seems to be reported by various people.

 

[cgrant26]

Check out this pic posted on nasa.gov. Probably one of the neatest eclipse pics I've seen. Guessing this took a lot of layer stacking from numerous cameras to get.

[Drax Spacex]

Yeah lots of post-processing in that image.  Enhancements to detail, contrast, structure, highlight, shadow, etc.  Some of those fine lines, swirls, and curves may be artifacts of the processing.

Oh, i see they included the moon in that image too - that's cool!

Edited April 12 by Drax Spacex
moon