Chasing the eclipse II
My brother Mike, his wife Rosie, and I traveled to Huntington, Oregon, to chase the August 2017 eclipse. For the 2024 eclipse, the three of us, plus my wife Janet, chased the eclipse to near Sulphur Springs, Texas. We had a blast!
Mike and Rosie came to Siloam Springs the Thursday before the eclipse. We packed up a van we rented with all of our equipment — and we were off. Just about every cubic inch was stuffed with our equipment and survival stuff. We didn’t know what we would encounter, so we brought everything. I would swear that the van bulged.
When our families get together, we laugh all the way. This was no exception. There were lots of jokes, one-liners, and astute observations. Mike and Rosie had never seen ‘Green Country’ in the spring when the Dogwoods dotted all the shimmering forests we saw. They were agog with the beauty of rolling green hills, forests, and wildflowers, literally at every turn.
We rented a spot at an RV camp about 10 miles south of Sulphur Springs. It was Hopkins RV and immaculate — the best I have ever seen. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to visit this area.
We set up camp on a large concrete pad and checked the weather. There were solid clouds. And … solid clouds. This was just Saturday, and we said to ourselves, “Well, it could still be clear at the time of the eclipse.”
That night, it rained. My brother and I slept on cots. Our sleeping bags leaked.
We awoke the next morning to enough sunshine to dry our bags, had breakfast with my wife’s excellent muffins, and said to ourselves, “Well, it could still be clear at the time of the eclipse.” Hope springs eternal.
We spent Sunday tuning our equipment and getting polar alignment that night with enough holes in the clouds to achieve this. Our hope continued, but those darn clouds would not go away.
Monday morning — clouds. Hmmm. I know my personal hope drained a bit, but we noticed the clouds were rapidly drifting north, sometimes producing big holes and blue skies high up. If we could just get a hole during the eclipse! We just needed four minutes of clarity.
Eclipse time — about two minutes before the eclipse, a beautiful, big hole in the clouds opened up. Yippee!
Mike and I shot over 100 images each. We both set our cameras at ISO 200 and 1/2000th second to begin. Our focal ratios were both at f/5.6. As totality continued, we each lengthened our exposures because this would show more of the corona, the Sun’s atmosphere. The corona can extend more than a million miles from the Sun’s surface, and we wanted to photograph its extent as best we could with the equipment we had. [My friend, Clinton Willis, added a bit of color to the image of prominences to make them stand out a bit more.]