J.P. Lawrence Photography

03/15/2025

I stayed up from about 12:40am to 6am with the occasional nap to photograph the yesterday morning. Each partial phase is approximately 10% progressions through partiality. All are composites of 10 images to deal with noise and improve clarity.

09/19/2024

Super Harvest Partial Eclipse Moon from last night. This is a composite of 63 images, stacked in AutoStakkert

06/17/2024

I finally had opportunity to go look for the Brood XIII 17-Year Periodical Cicadas (Magicicada) in Lemon Lake County Park, Indiana. I had great success, and I believe I found all three species (M. septendecula, M. septendecim, and M. cassini). The particular highlight, however, was a female blue-eyed variant of the Dwarf Periodical Cicada (M. cassini). This is said to be a "one in a million" variant. The Field Museum in Chicago didn't even have one in their collection until this year. Here is a normal one and the blue-eyed variant. Super stoked to have found one!

05/13/2024

I went out again last night to try to see the aurora. This time, I went to Lake Michigan in hopes of seeing it again. We did see some, though it was not as intense as the previous night. Enjoy!

Timelapse taken on May 11, 2024 at Silver Beach in St. Joseph, Michigan. A solar storm happened resulting in aurora borealis shortly after sunset.

05/11/2024

Last night we had the strongest solar storm the Earth has seen for 20 years. It resulted in aurora being seen in all 48 states. This is a time lapse of what I saw in southern Michigan at the Dr. Lawless International Dark Sky Park / Michigan Dark Sky Preserve

On May 10, 2024, there was a G5 Extreme Solar Storm which resulted in aurora visible through all the lower 48 US states. This is a time lapse from southern M...

04/26/2024

Here is, likely, the final version of this. I went through my corona images and reprocessed them. In the first version, I aligned individual images to the moon, which is problematic and caused the corona to be blurry since it did not move. So when I re-edited, aligning to the corona, it looks much sharper! This will be printed!

04/23/2024

I'm still working on some more photos. Here's one I was eager to get as well. This give you an idea of how far the sun traveled during the eclipse. What's cool during totality is that you could see stars and planets.

If you look closely, you can see Venus!

04/19/2024

How about a fun photo from the eclipse? Not that the others weren't fun, but this was another creative way to enjoy it. You might have watched the eclipse with a pin hole viewer. The general principle is that if you have a very small aperture the light going through will reflect what is actually happening with the sun. In areas, like fully leafed forests (not the case for where I was), you can see lots of crescents from light peaking through. I decided to use that principle to make a message to commemorate the eclipse. This was rather fun!

04/15/2024

Oh, we're not done yet. One of my goals was to be able to get a smooth time lapse of the entire eclipse. This was unexpectedly time consuming because it involved manually aligning about 650 photos together and get transitions across them. It took about 3 days, but I'm really happy with the result. Watch it at the highest resolution.

And don't worry, there's more eclipse content coming.

This was taken during the Total Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2024 in Brown County State Park in Indiana, USA. This is a composite of photos aligned together to ...

04/11/2024

I hope that you're not tired of total solar eclipse photos yet! Here is a composite including my previous coronal image, but adding in the transitions to totality. The Diamond Ring is a much sought after photo in the eclipse because it is really the last rays (or first rays) of light before the moon blocks the sun. Following the Diamond Ring is Baily's Beads which is a notoriously difficult feature to catch because at this point in the eclipse, things are rapidly changing. You see the Diamond Ring break up into "beads" which is actually because of the topography of the moon. The craters and ridges unevenly block light giving the beaded effect. This only lasts for seconds, so it can be a challenge to capture.

This composition of 123 photos shows the transition from Diamond Ring to Baily's Beads to Totality and back. This is an image I may have to frame.

04/10/2024

Ever since the 2017 Eclipse, I have dreamed of this image. I think I can still work on it and tweak it to make it more impressive (adding in prominences, for example). This image took me 2 days to edit. It is comprised of 97 images of the eclipse. I am particularly happy that I managed to get Earthshine (the sunlight reflecting off of the earth and illuminating the moon during totality).

This image was taken at Brown County State Park in Nashville, Indiana.

04/08/2024

I traveled to Brown County State Park in Indiana to view totality of the . Weather worked out great and I have a ton of photos to go through. This is my first rough edit showing the extended corona. I'll be posting more as I continue editing the photos