On the Road Again - Eclipse 2024

This morning, Saturday looks like it is going to be a perfect eclipse day, clear skies and the sun is just about to come up. Sunday thru Friday don't look very promising. I will be ready no matter what....well, except if it's raining!

No, sunglasses will not be enough protection!!! Eclipse glasses should be available for sale in lots of places because the eclipse is so popular and publicized. You only need the glasses during the partial stage before and after totality, but totality is the real show. I wouldn't bother with shooting with your phone except during totality. There will be millions of images available of the non-totality portion of this eclipse. Are Your Solar Eclipse Glasses Fake? Here’s How to Check

All I can say is I would take the chance. My sister and brother-in-law drove a couple hundred miles ti see the 2017 eclipse and they were really glad they did and they watched it through the sunroof of their car. I have never heard anyone who has seen totality, say they wish they had missed it. Everyone who I have talked to, said it was one of the most memorable moments of their life.We had a beautiful sunny day here yesterday and today is pretty nice so far, and tomorrow is still being predicted as partly cloudy. I don't know if partly cloudy is better or worse than partly sunny, but I am setting up and testing my telescope/camera equipment today. We are having a wonderful family reunion/eclipse party today and tomorrow and we got to meet our year old twin grandnephews yesterday for the first time...it's a great trip!One more caution about eye protection, it is not safe to wear the eclipse glasses while looking a camera or scope. The light is focused on the glasses and will melt both the glasses and your eye. Only look at the sun through a camera if there is a solar filter on the front of the lens!

Something interesting to watch for tomorrow. Wear red and green to experience the Purkinje effect during the total solar eclipse By Taylor Nicioli, CNN

quote:

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Over two centuries ago, physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkyně noticed that red flowers looked bright carmine during sunny days but appeared to change to a deep muted hue come nighttime.

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The phenomenon, now known as the Purkinje effect, explains why colors look different depending on how much light is present. In low light, bright reds appear darker, faded and sometimes almost black, while blues and greens tend to become more vibrant — and a total solar eclipse provides an ideal opportunity to observe this shift.

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Usually, the Purkinje effect unfolds slowly as day gives way to night. The eyes, which use two types of light-sensitive receptors, begin to switch from using cone cells that give the brain information on what color is seen in bright light to relying on rod cells, which take over in low light and typically only pick up blue-green wavelengths well, said Will Snyder, manager of the Saint Louis Science Center’s James S. McDonnell Planetarium in Missouri.

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“What we’re seeing with the Purkinje effect isn’t actually happening. It’s just the way our eyes and brains are interpreting light,” Snyder said. “As we get into the totality with the darkening of the sky, our eyes don’t have time to keep up with those changes, so one of the consequences is things that are red tend to look much more muted (in comparison with) things that are blue or green in color.”

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The sky is clear here this morning, but clouds are predicted to move in and then start breaking up about 2 pm and totality is predicted to start at ~3:06 and last 3 minute and 50 seconds.My wife and I both woke up this morning with sore throats and coughs. We will test for Covid later, but we're hoping it's just a cold. We have not had any colds for more than 6 years. But it's ECLIPSE DAY!

You are out of the totality path, but the partial eclipse will be visible there.

We had high hazy clouds here but we could see it quite well, but the corona was blending into the haze some so I hope my over exposures picked up the corona through the haze, but that will probably have to wait until I get back home to Oregon to process those images on my imaging computer. It was a good one and worth the trip. During the whole event the sun was almost directly overhead so I had to get creative with my tripod to position the telescope and camera and I have a hell of a crick in my neck, but worth it!We also took a group picture with our eclipse glasses that I will photoshop a totality shot above us. We did that for the 2017 eclipse and everyone used it as the background image on their phones.Percy, sorry you got stuck in traffic, that was part of the reason we arrived here a few days early.

OK, I will see what I can do, but it's still going to have to wait until we get back home before I can process them. I don't know if I actually got a single good photo, because I had to shoot almost straight up and I may have a permanent crick in my neck and in the opposite direction in my lower back. I will need to figure out somewhere to host the image files, also.

OK, but you will have to be patient.I think I got the Diamond Ring and Bailey's Beads at the end, if they are in the frame...I had to adjust telescope/camera to try and keep the sun centered, and it was a situation where I had to loosen 2 tripod knobs, but not too much, nudge the position, without over shooting, and then tight both which has a torque affect. That's partly why I practiced yesterday and this morning to get used to the knobs and positioning, but yesterday from noon on I couldn't see the sun, so I was surprised how much directly overhead the sun was at 3:00, be cause we're on the west side of the time zone here. Anyway I had to keep making length adjustments to the tripod legs as the eclipse progressed to totality. We had a patch of the high hazy clouds in front of the sun, so we could see an eerie bright ring that was the brightest part of the corona but to my eyes (but maybe not my camera). I lost the rest of the corona in the clouds.I haven't looked at any of my shots on my camera's view screen yet...I guess maybe because I'm nervous that I blew it. In 2017 I knew I'd nailed everything I wanted to capture as soon as totality was over AND I got to watch it too! This time it was so difficult to see through the camera viewfinder that I stayed in the crouched on my knees position for the whole 3:50 of totality and my head was turned looking over my left shoulder. I did get to enjoy just watching that spectacle during the middle minute or so.It's been a long day so I'm for bed.Patience!

That looks pretty good.I checked my totality images and there are a few keeper, but many are disappointing. This is all ok though, because I didn't think there was any way I could improve on my 2017 shots. This one was memorable and many millions of people got to witness it and reports say that the clouds parted at many localities just minutes before totality!I am hoping that in coming days we will start seeing images that show the corona structure better, and I am eager to see the results from the many scientific studies carried out on this eclipse.

We spent a few days in Chicago visiting my best friend and her husband and mapping out our research this season. Now we are in Wisconsin visiting my other best friend mapping out our research (the same research mentioned above).Next we are heading to New Mexico to visit my grandson and some of my wife's family.

We made it to Alamogordo, New Mexico today. Our grandson is stationed at Holloman Air Force Base near here. It's his birthday so our arrival was perfectly timed. We are going to stay here for 5 days so my wife can visit family in Los Cruces.

Boy, it sure is good to be alive and warm in the sun! What an amazing story. Good luck with continued recovery!

Yesterday our route to the Petrified Forest National Park took us past the Very Large Array Radio Telescope and there was a rest stop right by some railroad tracks crossing the highway (really just a pullout) so we pulled over and I got out and started taking photos of the receivers all lined up, when I realized the closest one was moving toward us very slowly. There were 6-8 railroad workers and several vehicles right by the crossing but we just thought they were RR workers, so we hadn't paid much attention.The telescope came right by us, and these suckers are huge, much larger than expected when you see them lined up in the distance. What a novel solution to moving the whole system into different configurations, the telescopes are mounted on a vehicle/carrier that sits on 2 sets of RR tracks and it turns out that they change configurations every 3 months. And we happened to come along just in time to watch!Petrified Forest NP was also pretty spectacular. Today we are headed for Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument.

Please stop posting bullshit religious crap in this thread.