The building anticipation as totality approaches is hard to describe.  Peering through eclipse glasses reveals an orange, pacman-looking hole embedded in a sea of black.  Each time we look, the crescent of the sun shrinks more and more.  We can clearly make out the perimeter with the naked eye, but only the camera with the optical help of a lens or telescope proves that there is more than meets the eye!

The 2024 eclipse was very much expected to be a much more active display than 2017, as we've crawled out of a solar minimum since then and are near peak solar activity which will typically result in more sunspots, greater prominences, and a grander corona.  I've already posted some of the wonderful northern and southern filaments we were graced with at the beginning and end of totality, but we can even see some nice solar features well before totality.  Here on display are sunspots sunspots 3628, 3632, and 3633, regions of high solar activity with increased magnetic flux that restrict the typical surface convection of the sun and ultimately result in a lower localized temperature.  The eclipse phase here is prior to totality, and was a good indicator that we were in for quite the show.