2024 Total Solar Eclipse

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  I drove to upstate New York because (i) my lady friend Laura lives near Lake George, which is not far from the path of totality, and (ii) the weather prospects for the Plattsburgh area were, paradoxically, better than anywhere else along the path.  This despite the fact that the seasonal average of cloud cover there is the worst of any place along the path, so maybe it was "opposite day" as far as weather was concerned.

  My plans were to acquire a wide range of exposures of totality so that if I got help from someone with image processing skills, I could assemble a layered image showing detail in the inner and outer corona as shown in this image taken from Maine or this image from Indiana or from Missouri.  My main system for obtaining these images was my Nikon D600 attached to my SkyWatcher 150mm f/5 (750mm focal length) achromat.  I also had an old Nikon D40 (cropped sensor) attached to an older C-90 (the combo yielding an effective focal length of 1,500mm).

  I had a third camera set up to capture a wide angle sequence of the entire eclipse from first contact to fourth, with the intention of getting a decent view of the total phase in the middle shot.  That camera was a D5000 with a 28mm lens on a static tripod.  Unfortunately, I wasn't familiar enough with that camera since I only recently bought it because it had a built-in intervalometer that my D40 didn't have, so once I started the eclipse sequence I realized that I didn't know how to adjust the exposure for that middle shot of totality, so I was stuck taking a picture of totality with the same settings I used for the partial phases #$@%^(*!  I was hoping for something like this shot from Quebec or this from Maine.

  In the picture on the right, Laura caught me pointing out Jupiter to our group; despite all of my imaging efforts and planning, she was the one who got a wide angle view of totality and even got Venus in her shot, the white spot above my head LOL.  In Laura's picture, you can clearly see the area of twilight at the bottom near the horizon, which is to the south of our location where the eclipse was not total.

  The pictures below show the scene at the Valcours rest area on I-87 south of Plattsburgh, which was so filled up with eclipse viewers that the rest rooms ran out of water and the toilets clogged up!  Supposedly they were making efforts to bring porta-potties to the rest area but I don't think they made it before the eclipse was over.  I am looking through the viewfinder of my camera on the Celestron C-90 in the second picture: