Welcome to Revengeance, a series where I seek revenge and/or vengeance on things that I feel have wronged me, whatever that means. For this first installment, we’re starting small: the sun and the moon.
1994: Ohio
In 1994, I was in middle school in Columbus, Ohio. On May 10th of that year, an annular eclipse was passing over the midwest, so we’d get a decent partial eclipse where we were.
We could go outside to look at it, but only if we brought our own protective eye wear and got a parent to sign a permission slip, because technically we’d be outside of the school building during school hours.
As a budding surly teenager, I did not have any interest in requesting permission for anything. I stayed in math class, like a cool person.
My less cool friends who saw it said it was “neat.”
I did not think about any interactions between the sun and the moon for 23 years.
However, in about a month I foolishly forgot to bring sunscreen to our class’s pool day and I got the worst sunburn of my entire life. Absolutely scorched.
That day, I started a list of targets for eventual revenge and/or vengeance. The sun was #1.
2017: North Carolina
In August 2017, I was living in North Carolina and was vaguely aware of the total eclipse that would be slicing through a large chunk of the country. In the center of the state, we weren’t going to see the totality, but we’d get 90-odd percent coverage, which sounded like a lot.
A few weeks beforehand, I bought some eclipse glasses to protect my eyes from my long-time nemesis. I also thought about bringing my camera to work that day — perhaps I could catch my shining nemesis in flagrante delicto dancing in the sky with a lower-class space rock. That was the extent of my advanced planning.
However, in the months leading up Jason Kottke started sharing lots of stuff about the upcoming eclipse: the gear to buy, how cool the total eclipse was gonna look, how fortunate we were that it’s only a day’s drive away for large swaths of the country.
Maybe, just maybe, I was missing out?
The day of I went to work as usual. At the peak, I stepped out into the plaza in front of our office. It was a smidge darker and shadows were a little sharper, but otherwise things looked… normal? Nothing that’d be obvious in a photograph.
Did I take any pictures at all that day? Let’s check the ol’ camera roll.
I took a selfie with the eclipse glasses in the office! It’s impossible to see what you’re doing with those on. It turned out great.
I tried hand-holding the glasses over my camera’s lens as a makeshift solar filter, but that didn’t work at all. It was awkward as heck, I couldn’t see anything, it wouldn’t focus even if I could get it pointed the right direction, and my longest lens was only 80mm or so, which would give me at best a few hundred pixels of coverage. Of the freaking sun, the giant ball of fire in the sky. I was outmatched. I gave up.
Oh, but I did take lots of pictures that day! A huge branch fell off a tree into my neighbor’s yard. I have dozens of shots like this that I took for insurance purposes:
So, all told, not a splendid day!
Later, I started reading reports from those that traveled to see the totality. They sounded rapturous, awe-struck, moved to tears. The pictures were unreal.
Some coworkers and friends that traveled to Tennessee for the totality confirmed that, yes, dummy, it was the coolest thing they’d ever seen. We were far beyond this being merely “neat” here. I was definitely missing out.
But! I saw that in 2024 another total eclipse was going to cut through America. In fact, it was going to pass over a huge chunk of Ohio, my birthplace and former home.
It was destiny. I swore an oath. I would do everything in my power to see a total eclipse. I would get my own kick-ass pictures. I would conveniently forget that predicting the weather in Ohio in April is the meteorological equivalent of a shrug emoji.
To my list of targets for revenge and/or vengeance, I added the sun’s occasional dance partner.
I had a date with revengeance. On April 8, 2024, I would have my revenge on the sun and the moon.
2024: Ohio, again
Lodging was easy. I had family in central Ohio still.
- Me
- Mom, are you doing anything for the eclipse in April?
- Mom
- The what now?
- Me
- PREPARE YOURSELF I AM COMING
Proper equipment was more work.
I ordered a pile of eclipse viewing goggles six months in advance. No sweat. But what to do for the camera?
My own entirely competent collection of cameras and lenses was insufficient. At this point, I didn’t even own a telephoto lens, because ordinarily I kinda dislike ’em. This would not do. Not when possible revengeance is at stake.
I rented a 100 – 400mm lens; that was the biggest thing left at the rental houses even months in advance. Because telephotos lenses are forever a disappointment, even 400mm looks “meh” when you’re pointing it at the sun, the giant ball of fire in the sky. So I added a 2x teleconverter to make it an 800mm lens. That costs me some light, but it’s a giant ball of fire. There’s enough light.
I had a compatible camera already, but it would have been “fine” when my mind was cranked to “extreme overkill.” So I also rented a 45-megapixel Nikon Z7. That’d let me crop down to a still-respectable 20 megapixels at the equivalent of 1200mm.
How’s my weapon of choice look?
Yeah, that’ll shoot down a police helicopter.
I decided to test it out in the backyard. Oh, look, a squirrel 100-odd feet away.
How’s she look with 1200mm of fury pointed her way?
Seemed promising! I guesstimated that a squirrel is a few billion times smaller than the sun, but that the sun is also a few billion times farther away than a fence.
To check my math, I asked ChatGPT about how many squirrels long is the sun.
1.4 billion squirrels actually seems a bit… low? Let’s double check that with Google’s Gemini chatbot.
Four trillion squirrels?! That’s very different! You know, I think my job is still safe.
With over-hyped technology failing me, I slapped a solar filter on the lens to see for myself. Here’s about 1200mm of sun.
Wait, what are those tiny dark spots? Some grunge on the lens? Nope! Those are sunspots, where the sun’s temperature is slightly cooler. If I was resolving those, I’m in business.
About ten days out, I started checking weather reports for April 8th in Ohio. It showed “fuck you, cloudy” basically everywhere in the totality zone.
“You shouldn’t even check the weather this far out,” my lovely and wise wife said.
“You are of course correct. You are as wise as you are lovely,” I responded before finding ten more weather reports and refreshing them again. And again. And again.
Six days out, I felt ill. Probably allergies. Pollen from plants, all of them powered by the hated sun.
Two days beforehand, we drove up to Ohio.
The day before, I was totally normal and chill.
I said this to every one of my friends and family, so it must be true.
I also said oh thank you for asking it seems like the weather is calling for clouds in the morning and clearing by evening but the important questions around when they’re clearing and if it’ll be clear enough to see the eclipse is a big unknown and where are you going to see it and do you have protective eyewear no really you shouldn’t look it’s very bad for your eyes I have some you can borrow but you can take them off during totality and oh don’t worry you’ll know when it’s totality and are you worried about traffic it seems like it could be bad but maybe it won’t be bad and isn’t it just a cool coincidence that the sun is 400 times larger than the moon but the moon is 400 times closer to us and that’s what allows a total eclipse to happen the way that it does but we only have 600 million more years before the moon has drifted too far away and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and.
A buddy of mine was up in Cleveland that weekend. Let’s see what I was texting him about while I was preparing a taco, shall we?
See, I didn’t even fix a typo in there. Normal and chill.
I had a friend with a house in the Dayton area, well inside the totality. I called her to confirm if it’d be OK for us to come her way. The weather (according to the averaged wisdom of 15 different sources checked approximately four trillion times) might be just a little more favorable there. We had discussed this weeks earlier. After this phone call she said “Oh, you’re like that.”
Yes, that. Normal and chill!
And that is how the day of we ended up in Brookville, Ohio.
Folks were fretting about traffic in apocalyptic terms, but we shot straight there. Perhaps this was because I left a normal and chill five hours in advance.
Schools were shut down for the day. There was an official town gathering for the eclipse in the school parking lot with some food trucks, some bounce houses for kiddos, and a DJ. There were some wispy clouds but nothing that would block the sun.
It was, against all odds in April in Ohio, a nearly perfect spring day. I couldn’t have asked for better.
I bought a root beer from a local shop. The name caught my eye.
Was this fate?!
I set up shop. My wife took this shot of me looking almost normal and chill about everything.
I even got a pretty good selfie this time.
After finally spotting the sun — it’s tricky to line everything up with this much magnification — I took a test shot.
I stared at the screen. Something seemed off. Was there a little chunk of the sun missing?
Oh, right.
Eclipse.
“Guys, it’s started.”
I immediately regretted not springing for a tracking mount, which would have automatically kept the camera pointed at the sun in the sky. That sucker moves fast! I had to fiddle with the tripod legs every two minutes or so before the sun left the frame.
I was concerned that the camera’s autofocus might not work with a solar filter blocking the light by a factor of 20 or so. Thankfully, the Nikon zipped right to the sun, perfectly, every time.
An unanticipated benefit of using a camera for an eclipse is that during the build-up it’s also a viewing screen, providing a better look at the partial eclipse than you get with the glasses. I invited some kids nearby to take a look. They took a picture of the screen with their phones.
Everything seemed pretty normal for a while. Unless you know what’s happening and can look at the sun with protective gear, you’d never know.
It’s not until well over 50% coverage that things seemed a little darker outside. Around 75%, it started to feel cooler.
Around 90%, it was clearly darker.
With a minute or so left, the street lamps in the parking lot turned on.
With a few seconds left, I pulled off the solar filter and quickly adjusted the shutter speed. Because a Z6 that I own is basically identical to the Z7 I was using, I already had pretty good muscle memory for changing settings quickly. Good thing.
It is impossible to describe just how goddamn weird things got, and how quickly. In a blink, it was dark all around. The horizon looked like dusk, but in all directions. We saw stars in the middle of the afternoon. The sky was broken.
I was able to capture a shot near the beginning of totality where you can clearly see some solar prominences.
How’s that look at 100%?
Excellent.
People cheered. Screamed. Wept. I was utterly stunned. I had prepared; I was also not prepared. Sucker punched, even though I saw it coming.
I had read that birds will start signing their nighttime songs during totality. We couldn’t hear any birds because the DJ was playing an amiable mix of Taylor Swift, Millennial wedding dance songs, and songs vaguely on theme (“Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “Black Hole Sun,” etc.). During totality, he was moved to silence. So something changed its song.
After I said “holy fucking shit” a few dozen times (sorry, children), I was able to gather enough sense to try to capture the corona.
I was thankful for my chill and normal obsessive research here. Lots of online articles that were supposed guides to taking pictures of the eclipse were basically “I dunno! Bracket?” But one actually good guide linked out to this amazing exposure calculator that was, as far as I can tell, dead on.
We had totality for three and a half minutes, but it felt like it passed in a blink.
Here’s an over-exposed flash of Baily’s beads, seconds before it’s all over.
And then it really is done. Suddenly it’s much lighter. You can’t look up anymore. The sky is unbroken. DJs resume their Cha Cha Slides.
My heart was pounding for over an hour afterwards.
When I got home, I made a quick collage of the event. I am aware that this is a bit of a cliché, but also I do not care because this one is mine.
I am grateful that I made these celestial enemies.
When our paths crossed, I can’t say that I defeated them. How could I? What are men to the moon and stars?
But our fated meeting gave me glorious purpose. The whole day was astonishing. I had so much fun. And I can never unsee what I saw.
It was — I mean this literally — awesome.
This particular three-body problem is resolved. I am at peace. I can cross the sun and the moon off my list.
Although… actually I did get a little sunburned that day.
Anyone up for a trip to Spain in 2026?
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