Dates: October 14-15, 2023

Crew: Sean Downs, Rydell Stottlemeyer, Monica Mah

Locations: Padre Island National Seashore

The Ring of Fire...

A very special celestial event took place in October 2023 across the Southwestern US- an annular solar eclipse. Unlike a total eclipse, where the Sun is totally obscured by the moon's passage, an annular eclipse is a special type of partial eclipse. The moon makes full passage in front of the sun, but because of their relative distances from Earth, the moon is actually too small to create total coverage, leaving a thin "ring of fire" when it's centered over the sun. In some ways this is even cooler than a total solar eclipse, although it leaves you without that feeling of nightfall or the view of the sun's corona. Regardless, with South Texas in the crosshairs for annularity, we decided to throw together a little road trip to Padre Island National Seashore (near Corpus Christi, 5 hours south of Houston) to see the full glory and do a little birdwatching and beach camping.

Beach Camping Night from Hell

We drove out on Friday the 13th after work, making it down to Padre Island after nightfall. When we got to the beach, the night was extremely hot and muggy, and we put up Rydell's "circus tent," a massive tent with vertical walls for standing room and tons of space inside. It was way too hot for the rainfly, so we left it off (mistake #1). After settling down on my pad with no sleeping bag (again, too hot), I struggled to fall asleep drenched in sweat and praying for just a bit of sea breeze. 

At about 1 am, we were all woken up as rain started to fall, and then quickly became a torrent of freezing water flooding the tent. We stumbled out into the night as a monsoon set upon us, trying to figure out how to get the massive rainfly over the tent properly. It took several tries and by the time we got it on and stumbled back inside, us and all our stuff were soaked through. And now I was utterly freezing! I huddled into my wet sleeping bag as the rain continued pounding outside, trying to get back asleep. The next plague was the wind. After an hour or so, the sea wind picked up fiercely and never stopped raging. It took our vertical tent walls and treated them like sails, battering us inside and threatening to tear the tent apart. Sand was whipping through every bit of mesh, coating the wet surfaces inside the tent and getting in our eyes and mouths. We tried fiercely to pile up our stuff on the windward side of the tent to hold it down, but it was blowing so hard it would pick up the corner of the tent and throw the full backpacks right at us. 

Eventually, I resigned to my fate and lay down in the windward corner of the tent, using my body as a sandbag to hold it down for the sake of the tent. Brutal hours passed this way, still freezing cold and wet, with sand constantly blowing in over me and the wind bashing my body back and forth. It was my worst tent night of all time, and I've spent a lot of nights in tents. 

Mercifully, the sun came up eventually and we took everything down to head to the visitor center, hoping the blanket of clouds would break up before the eclipse began. Needless to say, we were all exhausted now.

I set up a bit away from the crowds that were gathering, set up my camera on the tripod with my 55-250mm telephoto lens attached, and went through prep for my first solar photography. I zoomed all the way in, taped the zoom ring on my lens, and affixed a filter I had made with solar filter sheet I had bought from Thousand Oaks in advance. I cut a circle out of it, fitted it to an empty filter adapter ring, and screwed it onto the end of my lens to make it safe to point my camera at the sun. Then I sighted in on the sun and in manual mode, got the camera exposure right to see the sun and some surface details (sunspots were visible as dark areas).

The eclipse started at about 10:30am, and would last until 1:30pm. I wanted to capture as much as possible to put together a collection of the entire process.

It got noticeably darker during the annular portion, but definitely not "night" dark. After the annularity was over, the crowds dissipated and I took a few more before deciding 2 hours of staring at the sun was good enough for one day. Success!

Oso Bay Wetlands Park

In search of more birds after leaving Padre Island, we stopped by Oso Bay in Corpus Christi. Walking the boardwalks here we saw seabirds of all shapes and sizes. Numerous Pelicans were wheeling around over the water and diving in to fish, while spindly egrets and herons stalked the shores.

We had initially planned to camp another night at Padre Island or a state park on the way back towards Houston, but after our horrible night at Padre, we unanimously agreed to just drive straight back. It was a sleepy drive but we made it back, and I had a lot of fun processing my pictures afterwards to try out different composites of the whole eclipse.