Monday, August 21

Back in 2012 I flew to Reno, NV for a long weekend to see a “ring of fire” solar eclipse where the moon almost blocks out the sun. While I watched and tried to video the event almost nobody else took the slightest bit of notice. The same could not be said of yesterday’s total eclipse.

Back in November 2016 I knew I wanted to watch this but did not know what my plans for 2017 would be so I reserved hotels at four different locations on the path, from South Carolina to Oregon. Even at that time available hotels on the path of totality were difficult to find. In February I decided to put the Alaska trip together and, of course, none of the hotels I had booked worked. By this time  my choices were very far from the path and that is why I ended up having to drive over 300 miles from Butte, MT to Montpelier, Idaho and stop midway to watch the eclipse.

Even when I got up, at 5:15 AM, I could see a stream of headlights heading south on I15 from my hotel window so I grabbed a bite to eat and got on the road ASAP. Once I was close to the center line I started looking for a spot to park and quickly found an open area where others were gathering and the local council had provided a couple of portable toilets. The conditions were perfect as we waited and chatted to each other – clear sky, light wind and temperatures in the low 70s. I set up my camera and did the test exposures I had failed to do a couple of days earlier and then it started.

You’ve all read reports and seen photos so I’ll limit this to what I observed. As it got dark it felt weird because the light was not reddening, in fact it appeared to get bluish-green, it also got noticeably colder. Darkness fell quickly and the outline of the sun’s corona behind the moon was sparkling and everyone fell quiet. Even though totality was 2 minutes it seemed much shorter; the reverse was happening and the highlight was over. I managed to get some great photos of the moon moving across the sun on my Canon DSLR but my new Sony camera overexposed the images of the corona during totality. I also recorded the scene using my dash-cam and the period of darkness, plus 30 seconds before and after are included in today’s road video that can be found here.

The one fly in the ointment was the traffic as I drove south after the event. I was caught up in the huge backup on I15 where it took four hours to cover 40 miles. By the time I arrived in Montpelier I picked up a sandwich at Subway, settled into my motel, made sure my photos had come out OK then crashed.

I took many photos of the moon’s disk crossing the sun.
Unfortunately, my images of the corona did not come out as well as I hoped. To the naked eye the ring of light was much thinner.
It did not go completely dark as the shadow is about 67 miles across which meant sunlit sky was only 35 miles away from me.