Total Eclipse of the Sun, August 21, 2017
We went to Nashville to position ourselves for the August
21, 2017 eclipse. Had planned to be somewhere around Center Hill Lake or Sparta
for maximum totality. But at the last minute a friend scored an Airbnb in Mt.
Juliet on a quiet dead end street. We had shade, bathrooms and AC, which made
viewing comfortable and quiet. A reasonable trade-off for losing some seconds of
totality.
In the front yard I set my Orion SkyView Pro equatorial telescope
mount with an Orion TrueTrack sidereal tracking motor to polar alignment using
my cell phone and the Sky Map app. I attached my Nikon D5500 SLR with a Nikkor 200-500mm
f5.6E ED super telephoto lens to the mount. A 4” solar filter was adapted to
fit over the lens.
The initial pre-totality images were shot on manual settings,
RAW at 500mm, native ISO 125, 1/125s, f5.6. As more of the sun was covered I dropped
to 1/80s, and then 1/60s.
Totality was shot mostly on auto as I didn’t know what to
expect setting wise, and did want to watch it rather than mess with the camera. However, due to a classic amateur mistake (initially forgetting to remove the solar filter) the settings ended up
at 500mm, ISO 640(which I think I may have manually set while I was trying to figure out why I wasn't getting images with the filter on), 1/13s, f5.6. Looking back I would have shot totality at
400mm.
We headed out shortly after totality, north along back roads
in an attempt to avoid the predicted traffic. This worked for about 1/2 hour.
Then we approached the first small city’s lone traffic light. There was a 5
mile back up, crawling along. After 4-5 hours we made it as far as Bowling
Green, KY, only 80 miles away. Interstate 65 N there looked like a parking lot.
So we joined the thousands of other people searching for hotel rooms. We got
lucky. Fortunately we had prepared for this eventuality, and had a portable
buffet in our room, rather than in the nearby overwhelmed restaurants. We hit
the road at 6am the next morning on the now relatively empty interstate, and
had a mostly uneventful drive back to Charlottesville.
But it was totally worth it. Looking forward to 2024.
Wick Hunt
