With a hopeful weather forecast, last night I decided to take a chance and drove up to Burlington, VT to see totality. No traffic leaving home around 12:30am. I got here around 4am and then took a nap in the parking lot of the Panera I'm hanging out in right now.
There is a cemetery about 10 minutes from here, thinking that may be a quiet spot that is out of the way of the crowds to set up. I've got the 500L+TCs with a solar filter on it for the partial phases, and then plan to try bracketing during totality. But I also want to enjoy this (never saw totality before), so I'm not going to stress during those precious 3 minutes. If I get some shots, great. If not, so be it.
Wish me luck, there are already some high clouds on the western horizon.
Mark, my farm is on the inside edge of the track. We have been warned about the population of our county growing by a factor of 2 or 3. Here on the farm, about 1/2 mile from the state highway and the farm to market road on the south, I have seen maybe a dozen vehicles, one was a tractor pulling a plow.
We have mostly cloudy skies. Unless this clears up we won't see anything but darkness. The county and city leaders have been waging the fear story to people for a month about the traffic, telling us to gas up, store food and hunker down. You would have thought we were on the coast in Galveston with a category 5 hurricane coming in. I told my wife we should head to Walmart, get some gas then hit the grocery store and go out for lunch. This place is like a ghost town. I feel bad for all the retail places who thought they might make a little extra cash.
Talking to the locals here at Panera, they are worried about getting around. It's apparently way busier than usual. My main worry is getting home - it's just a 2-lane highway headed back to Massachusetts through New Hampshire. I'm planning on hanging out here, maybe until 9pm or 10pm. Hopefully the traffic will clear up by then. Will just have to watch it.
We had about 80% cloud coverage at 1:26 p.m., then at 1:36 p.m. when totality began, the clouds cleared the sun for the entire 4+ minute totality. The early clouds created a perfect filter.
Awesome work all! It's amazing how quickly the prominences change. I was expecting to be awestruck, but I was not prepared for how beautiful it turned out to be.
Long day - 3.5 hours from Boston to Burlington, VT on Sunday night with no traffic. Then coming home, both Waze and Google Maps were saying about 4.5 hours, so started back around 6pm. Ended up taking over 8 hrs, after just 3 hrs sleep the night before. Three bottles of Mountain Dew kept me going. And no bathrooms for the first 7 hours - the rest stops were packed.
This is SOOC, will be interesting to see how this looks after some Photoshop. Hope to bring out the wispy prominences at 10 o'clock. I have a bunch at different exposures that I will try to combine.
The cemetery I was planning to go to was closed, so ended up in the adjacent parking lot of the St. John Vianney Catholic Church with a couple of priests and locals.
Mark that 8 hour drive home reminds me of the 24 hour drive my wife and I took when we had to evacuate for hurricane Rita. 24 hours to go 200 miles. Crazy. The local gov'ts here were expecting that kind of traffic, it turned out to be less traffic than normal. I think the predicted cloud cover kept people away.
Nice image, looking forward to your additional processing.
Truly remarkable images here by all! Mark..FANTASTIC!!!
I was lucky here in Maryland we had fast moving clouds but I held my Singh-Ray Vari filter to Max and could see the entire eclipse very well with my 1 eye!
Were filters used on all the cameras? I was afraid that the sun would blow out the camera's sensor!
Danpbphoto wrote:
Truly remarkable images here by all! Mark..FANTASTIC!!!
I was lucky here in Maryland we had fast moving clouds but I held my Singh-Ray Vari filter to Max and could see the entire eclipse very well with my 1 eye!
Were filters used on all the cameras? I was afraid that the sun would blow out the camera's sensor!
Again GREAT-FANTASTIC images ALL!
Dan
Dan, I used a filter on the lens for photos during the partial eclipse, but as soon as it reaches totality, it can come off. So my photo (and I suspect the others) were taken with no filters. There is an app called Solar Eclipse Timer that I found referenced in the Canon board. It calls out status based on your GPS location. As soon as it announced totality, filters came off and we could look at the eclipse with our naked eyes.
This is the filter material on the lens. I also had it taped to my binoculars: Baader Solar Film
