Hello, friends! I have recently returned from a trip to see the 2024 solar eclipse (my first total solar eclipse!). I was traveling with a couple of friends. Due to weather-related concerns, we dropped our original plan to watch the eclipse in Buffalo, New York, and instead drove to a small town called Port Burwell, situated on the Canadian side of Lake Erie.
On the day of the eclipse, Port Burwell was the only place within hundreds of miles with a sunny forecast. Everywhere else was supposed to be cloudy or partly cloudy. Port Burwell’s forecast was sunny. We were not the only ones to realize this, and so we ended up being part of an enormous mob of people who descended upon this cute, lakeside town–a town that was very obviously not expecting so many people to show up. The locals were super nice, super welcoming, but also, very obviously, very surprised.
I wound up watching the eclipse from a concrete pier, with a cold (increasingly cold, once the event began) wind blowing on me from the lake. There have been only a few moments in my life where I felt like I’d been transported, body and soul, into another world: exploring the ancient cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, seeing the bacterial mats at Yellowstone National Park, and standing on that pier in Port Burwell while the last light of the Sun flashed and vanished behind the Moon.
What happened next? Speaking as a writer, as a man of words, as a person who owns an absurd number of dictionaries and thesauruses, please understand what I mean when I say I have NO WORDS to describe the next three minutes. Strange? Beautiful? Terrifying, on some deep and primal level? Those words point in the general direction of what this experience felt like. And that’s the best I, as a writer, can offer. Sorry. Words fail me.
Although, there is one more word I would use to try to communicate what my eclipse experience was like. It’s the name of a color. Magenta. As it so happens, the 2024 eclipse occurred during solar maximum, the most active part of the Sun’s eleven year cycle. Several solar prominences (those giant, fiery arcs that rise up from the Sun’s surface) were visible to the naked eye during the eclipse. One extremely bright prominence appeared near the “bottom” of the Sun, and I saw two other large, flickering prominences on the Sun’s righthand side.
To my eye, the prominences were the most perfect magenta color I have ever seen in nature. It was like the pure magenta that computers generate in a CMYK color pallet. The next day, I decided to try drawing the eclipse based solely on my own memory (see the image above). Memory is an imperfect thing. In my drawing, it seems that I made the bottom and righthand prominences bigger than they really were (probably because those three prominences stand out so prominently in my memory). But the color is about right. That color is, I swear to you, the color that I saw. Which is strange, because my best friend, who was standing right next to me at the time and who was definitely seeing the same eclipse I was, swears the prominences were bright, bright red. Not magenta. Red.
After I drew my version of the eclipse, my friend used color correction software to try to approximate the color he saw. He tells me his version is still not quite right, but it’s close enough. So here’s the side-by-side comparison:
After comparing notes with a few other people who also saw the eclipse, it seems that most people (but not everyone) saw what my friend saw: a bright red color. One person went so far as to call it an orangey-red color. Only a few people saw the same magenta color I saw.
There’s so much about the eclipse that I did not expect, but this red vs. magenta thing is the part I expected the least. So I want to end this post by asking you, dear readers: did you see the eclipse? And if you did, what color were the solar prominences? Did they look red to you? Did they look magenta? Did you, perhaps, see a different color entirely?
Planet Pailly 
I didn’t see it. It would have been a partial here (88%), but it was cloudy and raining. And work forestalled anything more.
I did watch videos and see pictures, in some of which the prominences are reddish-orange. Of course colors on something like this can be hard to catch accurately. How soon afterward did you talk with the others about their perception? Sometimes memory can be altered by seeing pictures of the event, even if it doesn’t accord with our personal experience.
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It was 24 hours later before I started having these conversations with people. You’re right, seeing other people’s pictures may have colored people’s memory (no pun intended). And a few people I talked to had to think really long and hard to remember what color they actually saw. So if this were a scientific survey, I guess that might call some of my data into question.
However, I did comment on the magenta-ness of the eclipse as it was happening, and my friend immediately asked me what I meant by that. Whatever I said next didn’t really clear up the confusion, but it wasn’t until the next day when I did my drawing that he and I really started talking over what each of us saw. So at least for the two of us, I am confident that we really did see different colors.
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It’s definitely possible for people to just perceive different colors. We have the infamous “dress” incident from 2015 as a good example. Color is an evaluation done by our brains, and it depends on many assumptions our visual systems make, assumptions below the level of consciousness.
As an artist, I suspect your visual system is trained to notice things and make different assumptions from the rest of us. (Unless your friend is also an artist. But even then, it probably still depends on your respective histories.)
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I was doing a project once where I had to use a limited color pallet. I ended up using turquoise as a primary color instead of blue. That did mess with me a bit. I remember a moment when I stepped outside and saw that the green of the trees and the blue of the sky were just two different shades of turquoise.
That kind of relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Some languages use the same word to mean both blue and green, and people who speak those languages reportedly have a little trouble telling the difference between blue and green color swatches. My “turquoise moment” with the trees and sky was the first time I really understood that.
My friend is not an artist in the same sense that I am, but he works in video game development and I think he’s as cognizant of color as I am. In fact, he was the one who first brought up CYMK colors as a way to make absolutely sure we understood what color we were trying to describe to each other: #FF0000 red vs. #FF00FF magenta.
Ultimately, it is just a matter of people perceiving colors in different ways. Maybe it is just like the dress incident. Who knows?
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Wow, those are some stunning drawings of the eclipse! I didn’t get to see the eclipse but I heard it was a magnificent one. I wonder if there’s a reason it looked magenta, it’s not a common colour in space?
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Hold on, I just saw some photography people took and they had magenta around the corona too! I’ll have to look into it!
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Scientific American posted a really good time lapse video of the eclipse on YouTube. It looks almost exactly like what I remember seeing, especially toward the end of the video when the prominences near the bottom and righthand side start getting bigger and brighter.
But I’ve also seen pictures where the prominences look more red. Of course, cameras don’t process color the same way the human eye does, so it’s hard to know from a camera what individual people actually saw.
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I’m guessing it’s the hydrogen emission spectrum. I know there are hydrogen lines in both red and purple. So seeing magenta makes sense. But so does seeing red.
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Just read an article from IFL Science. It said the “pink” color during the eclipse was a combination of hydrogen’s red emission line (hydrogen-alpha emission) plus the white of ordinary thermal emission.
I don’t consider IFL Science to be a super great source of information, but that explanation does make some intuitive sense to me.
https://www.iflscience.com/the-total-solar-eclipse-was-surrounded-by-bright-pink-streamers-what-were-they-73752
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I would trust my vision – because we all see something different, but what we see is meaningful to us!
This eclipse seems special to you from your lovely article, and just keep that for yourself- for I might get jealous…. about what seems a very meaningful experience to you. 🙂
I saw 1999 eclipse in Croatia, and I felt it was significant too, but it was just grey – little greyness in the middle of the day, no one seemed impressed around, not even looking – weird, right?
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I suspect some of the locals in Port Burwell felt the same way. And that’s fine. I get it. I’ve been at sporting events where really amazing plays were made, everyone around me went crazy with joy, but all I felt was “Yeah, that was neat.”
Our past interests and experiences shape our present. I have a lifelong love for space and science. I’ve spent most of my life reading about this stuff and learning about this stuff. That helped made the eclipse one of the most powerful experiences of my life. But without that background, I probably would’ve just thought the eclipse was kind of neat.
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This was my fourth total eclipse, and the awe remains. It does defy words, and I don’t have specific linear thoughts during totality – I just watch! I saw red prominences. Congrats, JS, on your own experience. I’ve read that while most of us humans have 3 color-sensing cones in our eyes, some have four! Maybe you’re one of the lucky few who see more of the world that the rest of us.
My spousal unit and I had originally planned to view from Texas, but the forecast sent us north, and north again. All the way to Batesville, Arkansas. Not only did we outrun the clouds, but also the expensive parking spots in fields along the way. No extra charges in Batesville. Even the hotel rooms seemed to be the usual prices, and everyone was super-nice.
Perfect weather! We watched from a lovely riverside public park. Any stranger wearing an eclipse or astronomy or NASA tee-shirt was fair game to talk to, and they all were happy to talk to us. Like a family reunion.
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Tetrachromancy? Yeah, I guess that’s possible.
I heard Arkansas had a really, really good view. So many places got clouded out. One person I know missed the event entirely. He just watched the clouds turn dark then bright again.
This was my first eclipse, but it will not be my last! I’m already investigating a possible trip to Australia in 2028.
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That is very cool! Glad you got to a spot to see it. (NOT easy to do.) Interesting you saw a different color than most.
We saw a seventy-five percent coverage here but it was still really amazing. I ordered a lot of glasses and shared them with people at work. It was wild to see the moon making a sliver of the sun.
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That’s awesome that you had glasses to share! Getting to share the eclipse with others is, in my opinion, half the fun.
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I don’t know what the science is behind people seeing colours differently, but there is no doubting that it is a thing. A boss of mine was invalided from the navy due to colour blindness but, when we talked about colour in depth, I realised it wasn’t that he didn’t see colour, he just saw it differently – in particular, red and green. So, I don’t doubt that you and your friend each saw a different hue, but as a fan of the colour magenta, I’m picking your version.
What a fabulous experience!
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It was wonderful! And this thing about color was an unexpected bonus. It’s sparked so many interesting conversations.
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You had an awesome experience. I love the drawings. We were here in Arizona and only had a partial view (nothing colorful), but we found a nice spot in the middle of the desert and it was dead quiet and the time was honestly a bit spooky. My best views were online, but watching where we were was meaningful in itself. We were glad we took the day and drove. My third eclipse, the first being when I was a kid. Have never witnessed totality, alas!
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I got to see a partial eclipse back in 2017, and I do remember that being an eerie experience. The air got cold, and the crickets started chirping like crazy, like they do around dusk. So I agree, even a partial eclipse can be a powerful and meaningful experience, and I’m glad you got to see it. So many people I saw nothing at all, thanks to the clouds.
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Kids went to where it should have been totality. Clouds are not nice. Was 6 hours away and it was still aa great experience for them. Where I am 90% which was pretty great beautiful clear shot 🙂
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Sorry to hear about the clouds. They were hard to escape, but I’m glad they still had a good experience. We were lucky to find a place where the sky was clear, but it came at the cost of having a 10 hour long drive home.
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