General

About 30% covered here. Only going to get to around 80% at peak.

And it's past its zenith.

Here's my pics

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Very nice! Roughly where?

Austin, TX. I'm actually shocked I got to see it, it's been cloudy for a few days and is supposed to be thunderstorms later today.

I flew out specifically for this, Austin was supposed to be one of cities in the path least likely to be cloudy today. Oops.

All weekend long they predicted overcast sky's here. The morning didn't look good with near complete cloud cover. It broke up mid-morning to spotty clouds and never changed. Turned out great!

LOL.. of course during the time we should get the best part of the eclipse, a HUGE cloud covered the sun... Oh well, got to see it on the news..

Nice pics @Chad ! Thanks for sharing! We were around 98% here so I stayed home, spent the afternoon at my oldest kid's school and watched it with him. My husband drove with some friends to the totality zone. I saw one in 2017 so it wasn't a big deal for me. I didn't want to deal with traffic.

100% in Cleveland, was awesome!

Had 100% here in western KY too. We had 99% back in 2017, and I gotta say... that extra 1% makes all the difference.

It was spectacular. So glad I got to see it in person.

It was fun... I wonder if it will be my last? Next one in what... 20 years?

Yep, make sure and save those glasses!

Chad wrote:

Apparently those glasses have a shelf life of about 3 years. So probably better to just get new ones a month or two ahead of time.

i was being sarcastic, because who saves $3 cardboard glasses for 20 years?

Chad wrote:

I imagine people might use them in a scrapbook or box of memories or something.

I'm probably going to put mine in my hobonichi.

We drove up to St. Johnsbury, VT to see totality (~1.5 hours away). The weather was great. It was a beautiful day with just some wispy clouds.

We saw a bat flying around before totality. Maybe it was confused by the darkening sky? It got pretty cold as we got closer to totality. The eclipse itself was amazing. We saw some red dots on the lower left of it (prominences?). Also noticed that when it came out of totality, it was not where I expected (not the opposite from where it went into it). I need to look that up.

The drive back took 4 hours with lots of traffic from people leaving. We just got back. No regrets.

I had seen a total eclipse before in Aruba in 1997 which was also great.

Nice pics Chad! I'm glad you got to see it despite the weather.

Here's a crapty pic I took with my phone.
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The videos on the news/youtube with special lenses are incredible. At the office someone had the glasses and I took a look...it was only about 1/3rd of an eclipse here in CA but really cool to see.

While this kind of event is more of a curiosity than anything, I personally find it rather profound. I often joke(?) about humans just being bacteria on a rock in space, and this sure doesn't make us feel more significant. If the moon got "stuck" between the sun and earth...we'd be in trouble.

benstylus wrote:
There are options for recycling the glasses or passing them on to be used at the next eclipse, but most are likely to end up in landfills.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/viewing-glasses-ap...

Experienced my first totality eclipse, had perfect skies and it was crazy for those 2-3 minutes of totality how the insects start chirping, the temperature drops, the birds fly differently, my cat was in like a trance and he was not a fan but, it was awesome. 10/10.

Absolutely amazing event. No pictures that I have seen have replicated seeing it with my own eyes. How could they? I live in NW Ohio and these were taken from my own front yard. Totality lasted for about 3 and a half minutes. One of the wildest things I've witnessed. The bees left, the bats came out, birds flew home, all of the outside lights came on well before it was actually dark. The colors and shades that the sky turned was unlike anything else and it looked like the sun was setting at a full 360 degrees. Just astounding. Hard to put into words really.

In the first couple of pictures you can see a bright star in the bottom right. Apparently this is a planet, Venus I believe. In the last picture my phone's camera caught a reflection of the eclipse somewhere and the diamond ring is more visible.

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incubus421 wrote:

They can't. It's like playing Asteroids through emulation versus playing it on an actual machine with a vector graphics monitor.

There's a brilliance to it that doesn't come across in any other form but the real thing.

Disney will be in the totality zone in 2045 (the Florida one) can't imagine what that would cost to visit by then... probably $15,000 for a family. I think it was close to 6-8,000 recently when a friend went for 3 days with 2 kids.

sinnie wrote:


Viewing the eclipse will cost extra.

I had 100% coverage in Texas, here are some pics got with a good camera and a home made lens filter.

https://paste.pics/c4f908ed3371c8357653ff6257f1575...

https://paste.pics/9c903c67351c00fec44c5114a442d59...

So the Sun got mooned... anything exciting happen?

I had to work... I missed it, but I also wasn't too keen on seeing it. I think I've seen one or two before.

One thing I will admit though... I was expecting serious traffic issues but surprisingly my commute was not only easy, traffic was VERY LIGHT both going to work and going home (I have an hour's commute).

HybridCRoW wrote:

I think being able to look directly at the sun and seeing that picture above I showed for about 4 minutes plus it getting night time in the middle of the day (about 1:30PM) for about 4 minutes was pretty amazing. It was like a really fast sunset, then dark outside like night time, then a really fast sunrise. Something I doubt I will ever see again and just a really cool thing to experience.

I get that it may not be interesting to everyone but I thought it was really cool and something my wife and I got to experience together and for me at least it was a fun 3 hour drive so kind of like a mini road trip.

It's also something that you can't just do whenever.

For example, maybe a trip to Disney would be more fun, but you can do pretty much any time if you have the money for it.

No amount of money can make an eclipse happen on demand. The sun and moon are anticapilalist, and continue in their work, unfazed and unimpressed by the combined wealth of the entire world.

I didn't mean to ruin y'alls good time. I'm just saying while it is a rather interesting natural phenomenon, I just wasn't pushed in the right places to want to give work the bird and check it out but I did enjoy my commute to and from work as it was not as anticipated.

I don't think you ruined anything for anyone we just offered up a couple explanations, you didn't say anything weird or rude or whatever so it's all good

I'm a little late to this thread... We drove to Sandusky, Ohio to see it this time around -- just over a 4 hour drive for us. In 2017, we flew to Missouri to see it, but it was very cloudy -- so it got dark, but we didn't really get to see anything. This time around, the weather was great with just a little bit of hazy clouds, but we could still see everything -- so we were really happy.

I got lucky with some shots from my point-and-shoot super-zoom. No special lenses or filters or anything used for these...

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That last one was pure "luck". I wouldn't have purposely tried to do a shot with any of the sun visible since that is bad for the camera. I push the button to take another photo like the 2nd one -- and it just happened to be at the exact moment that the moon started to move away and you could see the first sliver of sun. So it ended up like this in the shot. I love this one -- but, again, just pure luck. I'll never get a shot like that again.

nice pics

Thanks! I feel like I got really lucky. I'm not a big photo person. I took my Nikon P950 thinking that I wouldn't likely get anything, but I'd give it a try. I took about 10 shots that were just blurry nothing -- then zoomed in a bit and it auto-focused better, so I took a few more right at the end (what you see above). I couldn't even tell through the viewfinder if I had anything. I went and looked about 10 minutes later (because we were busy talking about things for a while) and realized that I managed to get a few nice shots. 🍀

no tripod?! wow

Sorry, yes, I did have it on a tripod. Although I have taken decent moon shots at night free-handing it. But, for the eclipse, it was on a tripod. 👍

Did you use a timer? Even on a tripod pushing the button usually has a wiggle.

Well, I can't compete with these great photos. But, here's my watercolor painting of the eclipse.

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KCPenguins wrote:

I used the auto "moon mode" setting -- which automatically does a 2 second delay. So, you press the button and then it takes it 2 seconds later.

That's how I got lucky with that last shot with the sun just peaking out. When I pushed the button, it wasn't there yet.

bill wrote:

Nice! I'm curious if you did/started it while it was happening? Or just from memory/photo after?

memory/photo after

John wrote:
Very nice. Those are movie quality shots.

longhornsk57 wrote:
Cool.

In that first pic, the crescent is the sun?

nonamesleft wrote:

yes that's right. You can see the moon starting to block it and the crescent "moon" looking thing is the sun. It was too bright to look at with the naked eye without a filter until that 2nd picture, when we could all look at it for about 4 minutes (Waco, TX).

longhornsk57 wrote:
How was your camera able to capture such clear pictures?

it's just a DSLR with a good lens and I put a dark lens filter on it like this one:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1319799-REG...