All of my equipment has changed since 2017 and hopefully I have learned some things. Living in South Carolina, I did not have far to drive to find the center of the track for the August 21, 2017 Solar Eclipse. I did this video to try to capture the whole experience… most of which I don’t remember but for this video. So much could have been done better. I was shooting jpg at the time, was constantly adjusting centering on a pan-tilt head, shooting live b-roll, and It seems I knocked the camera out off focus a bit just prior to totality… But it was an amazing day with clouds all around while staying perfectly clear above until several minutes after C3.
In this video I combine stills from a Sony SLT-a55 with Sigma 150-500, live video from a Sony NEX-VG20, and time lapse from a GoPro. Oh, don’t worry, it’s less than 4 minutes long.
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Thanks for sharing! Your 2017 memories got me thinking about our plans back then.
We had a campsite booked that was close to the southern limit and planned to arrive two days ahead of time. As we were getting close, I recall saying to Alice “I bet, if we drive 30 minutes north to the centreline, I’ll bet we’ll find a farmer with a field who’s offering camp sites for $20 a night” - sure enough we did, and so observed from near Alliance, Nebraska.
However, I just checked out what we would have seen from our original camp site on the southern limit - while it was only ~1’ 10" of totality, it would have been preceded by the most spectacular 20s long display of Baily’s Beads before C2:
Ah well, you can’t have it all! (And, of course, I didn’t know about the beads back then…)
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Yes, we continue to learn and certainly do not lack for information sources. This morning I find myself obsessing over the simulation tool even as lenses, cameras, tripods and such are scattered about. I did a relatively full rehearsal Friday starting with my daytime polar alignment procedure for the tracker. That’s it! I am packing all the tech today. We head out Thursday and will have a couple of days on site.
Here is my C2-10 seconds…
