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About the data
Although I tried to research ahead of time “how” to photograph the eclipse, the recommendations (unsurprisingly) were in the language of photography which I did not speak. I was at square zero with the subject and terminology, and I was too preoccupied with other more important things that would also be happening during the eclipse to do a deep dive on photography ahead of time.
I spent the night before the eclipse learning the basics of things like exposure length and aperture by reading tiny print in the terse manual for my DSLR. I had no idea what kind of exposure would suit the eclipse but found a feature called a “bracketed” shutter where a single shutter press would take 3 exposures at various near-adjacent shutter speeds.
I wanted to enjoy the moment when it happened (and not be fixated on tinkering with the camera) so I worked out the most autopilot way my hands could spray-and-pray shots at various settings. I set up a bracketed exposure, and then figured I could blindly roll the shutter speed wheel back and forth to rake the bracket across the possible settings. Without looking at the camera, my thumb could just roll the wheel several clicks, hit the shutter button (and get 3 different nearby exposures) roll the wheel several more clicks and repeat, occasionally changing the wheel direction to go the other way. This way, with 90% of my focus on the sky, I’d get a large variety of exposures and sort out later which (if, hopefully any) came out well.
Knowing I had never once used a camera in manual mode before, let alone photographed anything astronomical, I tried to keep my expectations in check. My goal wasn’t to get something awe inspiring, just to get something that I could say I made exist and would be a souvenir.
There was a perpetual fear of clouds threatening to ruin the whole thing and it wasn’t until just before the event that they fortunately got out of the way. At least for us, 25 miles outside of Nashville on the line of totality. Huge swaths of people who had driven across the country and tried to view it in the city were not so lucky.
During the Partial Phase after first contact (C1), I took a series of photos as the obstruction of the sun progressed toward totality. Lacking any kind of proper solar filter I was shooting through a welding goggle which was far from ideal but allowed me to catch some photons without destroying the camera sensor.
I edited together this composite showing the both sides of partial phase around totality. The optics through the welding shade are a joke but I was happy to take what I could get.
Another fun thing is that I found this image of the Earth, taken from the EPIC camera on the DSCOVR satellite while I was standing there with my camera.
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