Friday, August 18th, 2017
The “Milli Fire” is pumping out a lot of smoke tonight. We're hoping this will stay to the west and not interfere with the eclipse on Monday which will be eastwardly.
It makes for a purdy, and somewhat fiery, sunset, however.
These pictures are taken without my solar filter. The smoke is performing enough filtering that it's okay to stare straight into the sun.
Monday, August 21nd, 2017
Now we've got our solar filter on the camera. These pictures are taken with my Canon EF 100-400mm zoom lens plus a 2x extender and an ND-100000 solar filter.
If you look closely [click the image in the index and go “full screen” to get the full size picture] you can see three sun spots near the center heading off to toward one o'clock and a couple more down around seven o'clock.
09:09 — We've got a bit of a nibble in the upper right corner of the sun.
The clock on my camera is ~40 minutes slow so the times in the pictures' metadata is that far off.
09:10 — A minute later and the nibble is slightly larger.
09:21
09:32 — My camera's light meter is not detecting as much light by this point, so these partial eclipse images are over-exposed to the point where the sun spots are no longer visible.
09:48
10:05
10:15
10:20 — Totality!!
Only this isn't anything at all like how it looked. I really should have removed my solar filter and gotten a picture as it was quite spectacular. We only had about 24 seconds of totality where we were, though and it took me about that long to find the sun in my viewfinder each time I took a picture. I was worried about taking too long and burning out my retina when the main disk of the sun peeked out from behind the moon. In 2024 in Waco, Texas I'll be sure to have that filter removed in time to get a picture of totality. In the meantime you'll just have to imagine how cool it really was. They say, “If you haven't observed a total solar eclipse, you haven't observed a solar eclipse,” and I can only add “Yep, they're right!”
10:20 — Totality!!
Here's a picture of totality that Kay Albrecht managed to get with her little Canon Powershot. Kay's a Coug fan (yeah, I know) from Spokane who happened to be with us there at the end of our soccer field where we set up to catch the eclipse.
10:23
10:32
10:38
10:42
10:48
10:53
11:01
11:10
11:17
11:28
11:32
11:35