Eclipse!

[tbutler]

Today was... entertaining. After weeks of preparation, we had a line of heavy thunderstorms roll through the area during and after the eclipse. ^^;;

But after spending close to an hour holding an umbrella over my camera gear in pouring rain (and getting soaked myself), dealing with cloud cover after the rain, having a thick bank of clouds roll over just at the start of the total phase... I found myself drifting into a Panglossian frame of mind. The weather kinda sucked, but given that just about everything went as well as it could have - or to put it another way, a lot of lucky breaks went my way.

I got up early enough to go to the third (and most preferred) site I scouted out - and a very good thing, because it was along the north edge of the storm and had some dry periods. The two sites further south were still in the middle of heavy thunderstorms on the way home...

I picked up an umbrella as one of the last-minute bits of preparation last night... and a darn good thing, too, as that's probably the only thing that kept me from ruining all my camera gear.

As I was packing the car this morning, I waffled a bit about taking a second camera - and I'm very glad I did, because while it was cool to take all the telephoto pics of the sun, I think some of the better pics were the ones I took with the other camera as I kept the one camera pointed at the sun. And in that sense, the weather was actually a good thing - I missed the photos of the totality and trying to catch the solar corona, but some of the pics of the sun sliding through holes in the clouds (like the one above) are possibly more interesting and certainly not like all the other people who took pics of the corona.

And while the cloud bank completely hid the period of totality, the sun found a hole just in time for us to see the 'beads'/'diamond ring' effect, where there are bright flashes around the moon just as it completely covers the sun.



Sun before the eclipse started, where you can see the sunspots!


Skies are threatening...


First shot after the rain - there go the clouds.


Some funky sky and clouds...


People coming back out, despite the threatening sky...


Getting pretty thin... (and note you can still see a few sunspots through the cloud haze!)


The sun keeps trying to break through...


...and sometimes it manages, when you look up close. Getting very thin now!


I like how increasing the exposure on this one captured some of the clouds glowing, not just obscuring the sun.




Last call before totality!



And while we couldn't see totality itself, we could see what it did to the open patch of sky on the horizon!


All in all, a bit of an adventure, but very glad I did it.

(Flickr album with full set of pics at https://flic.kr/s/aHsm2KWgE4 )

Comments

[yhlee]

Very cool--thank you so much for sharing! =D