Photographer flies through clouds to capture total eclipse

Photographer Ragnar Axelsson battled turbulence, shifting cloud cover and strong winds over Iceland’s Westfjords to capture a total solar eclipse for Morgunblaðið, mbl.is reported. The sky turned almost completely dark as the Moon’s shadow covered the Sun for about two minutes.

“I was not planning to fly at first because I knew the weather over the Westfjords was poor, but I felt a sense of duty,” Ragnar said.

He had initially planned to watch the eclipse from Greenland, but abandoned those plans after forecasts there were as cloudy as those around the capital area. He then set off from Tungubakki in Mosfellsbær with his brother and his brother’s son, all of them pilots.

“We ended up having to flee from the clouds,” Ragnar said.

The group first headed towards Reykhólar, where the sky had been clear earlier that morning. As they approached, however, they realised the area had become cloudy and continued north along the Westfjords.

At an altitude of 7,000 feet, they flew repeated circles between Bolafjall and Patreksfjörður, searching for clearer skies as the Moon’s shadow grew across the Sun and clouds gathered over the fjords.

The pilots repeatedly changed altitude, moving up and down by 100 to 200 feet, and tilted the aircraft by about 45 degrees so Ragnar could photograph the eclipse beneath the wing.

“I had four or five seconds to take the picture while tilting the aircraft 45 degrees. I simply had to get it right, and sometimes I could not even see the Sun,” he said.

During the partial eclipse, a thin layer of cloud protected the camera lens from the Sun’s intense brightness. But as totality began, the wind also strengthened, forcing the pilots to contend with turbulence while keeping both the aircraft and camera steady.

“We were completely surrounded by clouds and constantly had to climb and descend as they piled up around us. For a minute and a half, we had to fly circles at full speed. There were only four or five seconds to take the picture, so I pressed the shutter repeatedly and then had to wait and see how it turned out,” Ragnar said.

“You may have been a little stressed,” he said. “But you do not enter the field to lose.”

Ragnar said one of the images made the Sun look like a diamond ring and thanked the cloud cover for helping to protect the camera lens. The eclipse was the third he had photographed.