You spend a little while the nite before the eclipse going Old School. Please excuse my Old Kitchen. My location is 97/98% totality for the August 21 eclipse. My BIL drove to Tennessee on Friday evening to meet up with his photography club on a private farm where they'll all be taking professional photos. I experienced the May 30, 1984 eclipse in my backyard with 99.7% totality. It was cosmic.
Just in case we get sun, I made 2 pinhole projectors using fairly large cardboard boxes. I also mounted binoculars to a tripod, added some cardboard to provide a little shade, and have white poster board to project on. I'm ready! http://heavy.com/news/2017/08/solar...video-how-to-make-instructions-tools-youtube/
even with the sun back out, I'll just catch the event online: https://www.nasa.gov/eclipselive/#NASA+TV+-+Eclipse+Views+(Raw+Feed) There are a number of different feeds; it is already starting
Work network can't handle it. But will be walking to train right at the peak (will leave just a bit early).
I made one of those pinhole boxes so I could watch here where it was about 80 percent. The sun seemed as bright as normal but there was no sensation of heat on my skin. I could glance up and I quickly realized it was too bright up there to see much of anything so I pulled out my pinhole box to take a look. Sure enough I could clearly see a crescent shape and even the clouds around the sun on the white paper I had taped in the bottom of my pinhole box. I even managed to get a few shots with my iPhone looking in the viewer hole but they were pretty blurry. Trying to take a selfie with the sun over my shoulder was an exercise in frustration so I'm glad I listened to the guys who said to make a pinhole box. Maximum eclipse was at about 2pm here. I started making my around 15 minutes before. It's actually darker out now because those fringes of cloud have now moved in and the sky is cloudy here. If this wasn't on the news, I might not have noticed there was an eclipse and I live on the fringe between 75 and 80 percent blockage. No wonder they tell us not to look! I'm sure totality would have been awesome but I wasn't about to drive 8 hours and fight crowds just to experience it. Not when totality will be less than an hour away for the next solar eclipse in my area in 2024.
Planning to travel for 2024. I was surprised to also see the clouds along with the eclipse inside the pinhole viewer. That image didn't photograph well but I got a few plain pix later. I took some photos of the eclipse reflected by the tree leaves down onto the pavement at my house. Lots of little crescents in groups. My son walked over from his office to Central Park to view and took some crowd pix and then put eclipse glasses over his iPhone camera for a photo. The red photo is his; the others are mine.
The pinhole projectors weren't very satisfying, but using the binoculars to project onto a poster board was pretty good. The image of the sun was about 4 to 5 inches in diameter. We could actually make out sunspots. When the eclipse reached to about 25 or maybe 35 percent, dark clouds rolled in and it began to rain. Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk
