Eclipse Reports, continued:

St. Albans Bay, Vermont

By Jim Mazur and Laurie Averill

Laurie’s family has owned a cottage on the shore of Lake Champlain in St. Albans Bay, Vermont for more than 70 years. For many years we had been planning to observe the 2024 solar eclipse there, since the location was right in the middle of the path of totality. Our main concern was the weather, because long-term weather records showed about a 70% chance of clouds for this date in April. As it turned out, we were very lucky. Yes, there were high thin clouds over most of the sky, but the eclipse was still a very dramatic event, and we were able to observe it all the way from first contact to last contact. During the first half of the eclipse, the thin clouds produced a beautiful halo around the Sun. As totality approach, we saw the Moon’s shadow on the distant clouds across the lake, moving toward us from the southwest. It looked like an approaching thunderstorm, except that is was traveling much faster (over 2000 miles an hour, in fact)!

During totality, we were treated to a great view of the Sun’s corona despite the clouds, and there were some amazing red prominences visible on the rim of the Sun. One V-shaped prominence of the lower right rim was especially vivid, even without binoculars. We could hear people up and down the lake shouting and cheering at the spectacle.

Most of our pictures were taken with a Canon T6i camera and a 200-mm lens, which was covered with a filter from standard eclipse glasses except during totality. A series of images taken one minute apart were combined to make a video of the entire eclipse. The Sun appears hazy in the video because of the thin clouds, and its brightness varies as the clouds passed by, but the video is actually pretty close to what it looked like through our eclipse glasses.