Amateur Astrophotography

April 8, 2024 Total Solar Eclipse | Long Lake, NY

This photo, taken at around 3 pm, marks the beginning of the moon's transit across the sun. It's a bright, sunny day with light cloud cover.

At around 3:25 pm, the moon is wholly in front of the sun and we're able to take our solar glasses off and look directly at the sun. 

I had set my camera and tripod up to point directly at the sun so I could click the shutter button while enjoying the strange ambiance of plunging into darkness. I captured this "diamond ring" photo as the last beam of sunlight was covered by the moon. The red dot toward the bottom side is no mistake, it's likely a bit of a "solar prominence" - or large tower of plasma - that sat just outside of the ring of the moon. 

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September 27, 2015 combined supermoon and bloodmoon | Bronx, NY

When the Earth passes between the sun and the moon, the moon takes on a reddish appearance - called a bloodmoon. For this event, it also happened to be a supermoon, where the moon is passing very close to the Earth. 

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September 27, 2024 Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) | Westfield, NJ

At this point, invisible to the naked eye, it was incredible difficult to capture the comet. This long exposure appears a little fuzzy because it's nearly impossible to avoid any sort of movement in an urban environment. 

In contrast, it was very easy to capture the full moon which sat opposite the comet in the night's sky.