Total Eclipse of the Sun, August 21, 2017

                          

                        

   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