A Few Eclipse Day Photos

I pared down my selection of photos from our day of watching the solar eclipse to a nice, relatively small collection of good photos so I figured I would share a few of these photos here while I continue working on the video of the eclipse.  

The video will require some additional time and effort.  I have started working on it but I quickly realized it will require a lot more time.  I have almost 20gb's of videos totaling more than an hour of running time.  Sorting, cutting and splicing video is time consuming.  Since I used multiple cameras with different views, I'll need to spend some time interweaving different views in the proper order which requires a bunch of cutting and pasting.  That sort of messes up a fluid sound track so then I need to get the sound track just right with more cutting and pasting as well as adding some background music.  In other words, compiling a video from so much data from multiple cameras requires a lot of time and effort so I need more time before publishing the eclipse video.  

In the meantime, here are a few photos of the day.

We started our day at around 8am.  The eclipse wouldn't begin until 2:14pm but I needed plenty of time to setup the backyard for this event.  

I started by setting up the telescope mounts, leveling them with Lukey's help, and precisely setting them to our latitude.  Although it is always good to start out with a perfectly leveled mount, the ground was so soft that the heavy mounts were quickly out of level as the legs sank into the soft ground under the weight of the telescopes as well its own weight.  I set up the telescopes on each of the mounts.  

After setting up the telescopes, we arranged some tables and chairs in between all the telescopes.  Before long, it was time to start up the three mounts that track the sun automatically.  Those were controlled by software on tablets.  

One other mount was a big manual mount with slow motion control knobs used for pointing the telescope.  You slowly turn one of the knobs to keep the sun in your field of view.

At this point, it was around noon and I captured a group photo of us (I need to do this more often)...

Note the sky in the above photo compared to the photo below.  The above photo was shot a little after noon and the clouds were still slowly approaching.  We were now all set up for the eclipse.  We were more than ready at this point and now anxiously awaiting the start of this big event.

About four or five days before the eclipse, I had put together my own forecast as I usually do before any of our major events.  I disappointingly let Sheila know that my own calculated forecast shows that we will be under clouds before the eclipse starts on the day of the eclipse while all the national forecasts were still forecasting mostly clear skies.  It turns out that my Air Force weather education is still providing excellent results even though most of my career has now faded from my memory (well... faded to the far recesses of my memory...  unless I am sleeping which is another story).  

The sky was looking great before the eclipse.  By contrast, the photo below shows our skies during most of the eclipse.  Some parts were only obscured by very thin clouds.  

These cloudy skies were quite a disappointment but it still was a great day and I somehow managed to capture some really great photos.  Although we were a bit disappointed by the weather, the weather was far, far better than we usually get this time of year so, for that, we were very thankful.  Going by annual climate history for our area, we should have been socked in with steady rain falling from the sky.  We really got very lucky with the weather!

The photo below shows half of our site for the eclipse in our backyard.  It looks over-crowded but everything was separated nicely with room to easily walk between telescopes, tables and chairs.  

Lukey managed to capture a couple of photos of me!  Here is one of them...

Facial hair on me is quite rare and really not me.  When I am feeling my worst, I don't shave in an attempt to save some energy.  This facial hair seen here is a clear indicator of just how low my energy level is each morning for the past few months.  

I started doing this during a long hospital stay while on active duty and I've continued to do this whenever my health dips to very low levels.  This first time, during the long hospital stay, I was in bad shape, administered my Last Rites, and all my energy was going toward recovery.  The orderly room in the hospital was nagging me daily to shave but I refused.  Once they took a look at my records, however, and saw my background and ratings (a career field that is allowed to have facial hair), they stopped nagging me.  Plus, I had some close friends who worked in this Air Force hospital so that helped too.  So, when I do finally shave, it's a good indicator that I feel I have recovered enough to use some valuable energy to shave everyday.  

This facial hair in these photos is an indication of how this fifth bout of COVID has been affecting me and still is affecting me after many months.

As you can see in the above photo, we had solar glasses for everyone.  Those were really nice because they provided a very wide view while the telescopes provided close-up views.  

My homemade solar projection box got some use as well.  That provided some good views of the eclipse as well albeit a bit small on the projection screen inside the rather small box.  A larger box would have provided larger views.  It didn't matter though since we had all these telescopes and the solar glasses available for observing!  That homemade solar projection box was more about an educational moment for Lukey and Kenzie.  

Kenzie and Lukey did a good job at working the one manual mount I had set up.  I had my largest telescope with my best white light solar filter on that mount.  In fact, whenever our neighbors and their kids came by to take a look at the eclipse, Lukey and Kenzie did a great job at aligning the telescope for the kids.  

I'll close this blog entry with just a few photos of the eclipse through the telescopes.  

In this first photo below, we are in the initial partial phase of the eclipse, about halfway to the total eclipse.  This first partial phase lasts about an hour and fifteen minutes.  The phase of totality goes very quickly in just a couple of minutes in our location.  Other locations had slightly longer periods of totality while others had shorter...

The next photo shows some of the light from the remaining sliver of the sun shining through the mountaintops on the rim of the moon.  The sparkles of light that shine through these lunar mountaintop are called "Bailey's Beads"...

As you can see by the haze in each of these photos, above and below, we are well into the clouds during the eclipse.  The clouds added a glowing haze to each of the photos.  This is not an ideal situation because it cuts down on clarity, contrast and sharpness but, I have to admit, it does add a bit of depth, drama and even color to the photos.

Below is what is called the "Diamond Ring" phase of the eclipse.  The phases of Bailey's Beads and the Diamond Ring only last about a second so you need to pay attention and shoot quickly.  In this case, due to some mistakes on my part, I didn't actually capture any still images as I had planned.  These photos of totality here in this blog entry are photos that I luckily managed to capture in the video that I shot!  

And, last but not least, is a photo of the sun being completely obscured by the moon during totality (below).  This is a view that is only seen during total solar eclipses or through a very expensive precision scientific instrument called a coronagraph.  I wish I had one (not only are they exceedingly expensive but they are quite rare since they are not available commercially) but I do not have one so I had to wait for a total solar eclipse to be able to finally view the corona.  

I had planned to capture a much wider view of the corona during totality using one of my cameras but I really screwed up big time in the darkness of totality.  This particular camera body was still relatively new to me (although it is an older used camera) so I was not as familiar with the camera as I should have been.  I made a few mistakes and, after about 30 seconds of totality gone by, I aborted shooting photos so I could then just watch the rest of totality with my naked eyes.  As I was reviewing some of the video footage though, I realized that I could capture some images from the video!  That is what I did here for the photos of the Diamond Ring as well as for the corona.

This is a view of the sun's corona...

I'll share more photos in another blog entry later when I have completed the video.  The video will require some time to compile so that won't be available for a few days or a week depending on how I'm feeling and what I need to get done around the house.

Oh, speaking of getting things done around the house...  I mentioned in a previous blog entry that we had septic problems.  Yesterday morning, I dug out to the top of the septic tank.  During lunchtime, the septic truck arrived and the tank was sucked dry.  Before getting started on dinner, I covered the top of the tank again.  

It was quite a relief to have that problem fixed.  We've had a slow septic for weeks and then it stopped up completely this past Saturday (just in time for grandchildren houseguests to arrive) so we stopped using water unless absolutely necessary.  No showers, no flushing, only using a trickle of water when we had to use water.  I was definitely in need of a shower but my spine was hurting so badly after Monday's eclipse that I didn't shower until this morning (Tuesday).  That was a much needed shower!

Hopefully, there will be no more unscheduled repairs needed for the next couple of weeks.  I really want to get this eclipse video published!