The local news just mentioned that they expect 1 million out-of-state visitors in South Carolina for the eclipse. That’s a 20% increase in population. Concentrated in a narrow strip.
Here in Oregon the local news has been saying the same thing—1MM visitors, which for us is a 25% increase.
Apparently a significant portion of these people will be invading the eastern part of the state, where the roads are all 2-lane and the towns are sparsely populated and at rather great distances from each other. There is a lot of worry that the infrastructure and services won’t be able to handle the influx of people.
A very informative white-paper on eye safety for solar eclipses by arguably the leading authority in the field.
[QUOTE=B. Ralph Chou, OD]
When a person looks repeatedly, or with optical magnification, or for a long time at the Sun without proper eye protection, this photochemical retinal damage may be accompanied by a thermal injury. The radiation that is not absorbed by the photoreceptors is absorbed by the retinal pigmented epithelium, where it is transformed into heat that literally cooks the exposed tissue. This thermal injury, or photocoagulation, destroys the rods and cones, creating a small blind area. The danger to vision is significant because photic retinal injuries occur without any feeling of pain (the retina has no pain receptors), and the visual effects may not become apparent until several hours after the damage is done (Pitts 1993). Note that this thermal injury does not result from exposing the retina to solar infrared (IR) radiation. Intense IR radiation can also cause thermal injury to the retina, but during solar observing the main thermal hazard is prolonged unprotected exposure to visible light.
[/QUOTE]
(emphasis mine)
[QUOTE=Lancia]
Apparently a significant portion of these people will be invading the eastern part of the state, where the roads are all 2-lane and the towns are sparsely populated and at rather great distances from each other. There is a lot of worry that the infrastructure and services won’t be able to handle the influx of people.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, this mention was in the context of expected traffic and other problems.
:mad: I’m so glad we can drive to this eclipse and don’t have to rely on hotels and car rentals.
If it’s true that Hertz is cancelling reservations due to “overbooking,” but still renting cars at exorbitant prices, they’re probably going to be unhappy about it. The Attorney General here takes a dim view of such practices; there’s already investigations into hotels doing the same thing.
I have a parking spot reserved in St. Clair, MO, and I can’t wait to make the short drive down there with my son! We live in the suburbs around St. Louis, and our house is right on the edge of the path of totality. But St. Clair is smack in the middle, and they’re having all kinds of events that day, so off we go. I’m hoping we can avoid some of the traffic by staying off the interstate.
I think a lot of this prepping is going to be like Y2K: disaster anticipated, and didn’t happen because of it.
This is *really *what I’m hoping.
Our flight home is about four hours after the eclipse, and we’ll be about an hour’s drive from the airport if the roads were clear. As I keep hearing about how much traffic there will be, I’ve been getting increasingly worried that we might not get to the airport, return the rental car, get through security (we’re both TSA pre-check, fortunately), and get to the gate by departure time.
There wasn’t as much talk about crowding and traffic jams when I booked our trip a few months ago, or I might have arranged to stay over Monday night and go home Tuesday. Even if I had thought about it, my wife would have balked at missing another day at work.
My daughter and I are driving on Sunday from Pittsburgh to Louisville for the night, then heading to Franklin, KY first thing Monday to catch totality. It’s our first total eclipse - can’t wait! We have viewing party reservations at a alpaca farm. Mapquest says it’s a two-hour trip from our hotel, but we’ll give it six or eight, just hang out at Franklin’s various viewing parties if we get there too early.
You are going to be near alpacas during an eclipse? Isn’t that what happened to the Toltecs?
I’ll head up to western Idaho and scout out places along Jeep trails and forest roads near Smith’s Ferry, in the region of this map (Google Maps). So far it looks like partly cloudy conditions.
Dammit!
I thought I had this sorted. Glasses arrived from Amazon and I thought I had them from a reliable supplier. But no.
I got the " Important Product Safety Notification Regarding Your Amazon.com Order " email. Back to square one. Surely I can still find actually glasses and not just he cardboard ones locally!?
Seeing these Amazon news reports freaked me out a little. I intentionally ordered Celestron branded glasses and filters from Amazon two months ago, just to be safe. Then this weekend my granddaughter and I went to a library event where they handed out free glasses. I naturally wondered if they are safe.
This https://eclipse.aas.org/resources/solar-filters site lists the safe manufacturers and resellers. I know it’s been listed here before, but it’s been updated lately. For one thing, it lists the library glasses as being safe!
Also this evening I received a phone call from our hotel in Lincoln Nebraska, verifying that we will be using our rooms. We booked them last August, and yes, we’re going to use them. Seems like they’re completely booked and have a stand-by list. Imagine that. (No, the price hadn’t changed since we booked through Expedia.)
Besides the difficult of seeing a screen in the full glare of the sun, there are a couple of reasons why this isn’t a good idea at all. First, even if you could view your screen well in the glare of sunlight, the image of the sun will be much smaller than it, or the moon, would appear when you actually look at it. The second reason is one about which the public has hardly been warned at all: without the right kind of filter on your lens, the sun can “blind” your expensive DSLR camera or smartphone just as easily as it can your eyes.
I’ll be traveling from extreme Southern California to South Carolina.
Like most long distance travelers to the region, I too am doomed to languishing in the concourses of ATL for a couple of hours between planes!
I’m surprised the hotels wherever it is you will be in Oregon sold out so fast. I booked my hotel in Charleston only a few months ago. Distressingly, there is a chance of rain, but so far the Accuweather forecast mentions only the possibility of a thunderstorm.
Whatever happens I’ll make the best of it. If it is cloudy and all we get to observe is the peculiar darkening of the earth in the early afternoon, that in itself is a highly unusual and memorable phenomenon.
There is nothing wrong with the venerable pin hole projection technique onto a black piece of paper and then taking a picture of that. You protect your camera and your eyes.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
White paper, please!
Do you have a cite for this? AFAIK, the time it takes to damage modern camera is much, much longer than it would take to damage human eyes. So I think saying “just as easily” is overstating the case dramatically.
People take pictures of the sun all the time with cell phones, DLSRs, and P&Ss without damaging the sensors. In the bad old days of vidicon tubes for video recorders, you could permanently damage the tube by pointing it at the sun for a few seconds, but I think you’d have to point a modern digital camera directly at the sun for many minutes to damage its sensor, if then.
With a DSLR, chances of such damage are slim to none, because the mirror blocks the light from the sensor except during exposure. I’ve already done a couple of tests with my brand new Canon 80D, shooting a wide angle scene with the sun in the frame. I shot time lapse, 1 fps, for about 15 minutes, which is how I intend to shoot the eclipse. No problems. Of course, most exposures were about 1/2000 of a second. Hardly any light gets to the sensor in that time.
With a DSLR or P&S in live view mode, or a cell phone at any time, the image of the sun will be focused on the sensor for longer periods, so that increases the possibility of damage, but with wide angle lenses that are common on the latter two categories of camera, the possibility of damage seems remote in normal circumstances.
I’ve just done a little Googling, and there seems to be a lot of people who are saying that it *can *happen, but far fewer people providing examples of it actually happening. Here’s one. (Scroll down to “Don’t try this at home.”) Here the image of the sun, magnified by a 600mm lens, damaged an internal part of the camera, but not the sensor, after a one-minute exposure that was testing for lens flare.
Here’s another, a GoPro that was used to shoot a time lapse of the sun. The first part of the video shows images with the damaged sensor, but I didn’t see anything wrong at all until I rewatched them after he shows where the sun’s image moved across the sensor. The damage is very subtle, IMO, and only visible in relatively low light. GoPros (and other video cameras) don’t have mechanical shutters, of course, so in shooting time lapse with them, the sun is focused on the sensor the whole time. An ND filter might have helped in that situation.
So the greatest danger would seem to be unfiltered video cameras or long exposures, unfiltered, with long lenses. Amateurs with normal or wide lenses on cell phones or other cameras are unlikely, IMO, to do serious damage with a few snap shots or brief videos.
To be perfectly clear, looking at the sun through the optical viewfinder of a DLSR (or SLR) fitted with a long lens and no solar filter could damage your eye very quickly. DO NOT DO THIS!
But it seems that a lot of the warnings about damage to cameras are based on “this is how it seems to me” and “better safe than sorry” rather than actual cases where real damage was done. I’m willing to be proved wrong, of course, and in fact I’d like to have a better idea of exactly how such damage is most likely to occur. So if anyone has, or can point us to, good info on this, please do so. It just seems to me that a lot of people on the Web are passing on vague warnings with few hard facts.
Finally, to answer this question, while the eclipse is partial, hold one of your eclipse glasses (or another solar filter) between the sun and the camera just where the sun is in the picture. IOW, a normal selfie, but with the glasses held somewhere in the frame so you can see the eclipsed sun through them.