No iPhone or point-and-shoot camera is going to be able to image the sun’s disc without a filter.
Try it.
What you get is a huge blown-out area. This is true even for a mostly-eclipsed sun. The un-eclipsed portion is simply too bright, and the image is too small.
For example, this photo was taken during the 2012 eclipse, when the sun was maybe 50% obscured.
A co-worker of mine lives in Greenville, SC - right in the path of totality. I asked if he’d be watching.
Nope - his wife will be in pre-op for cancer surgery :(.
On the funny side: apparently he wanted to go to an eclipse party anyway! It’s my understing that Words Were Said :D.
I know he’s hoping that if they take her in on time (yeah, right!) he’ll still be able to get outside while she’s in the OR.
Sorry it took so long to reply to this. If you get there early enough, maybe. Advance reservations are sold out. I know a few people who are driving up to Glendo from Colorado, but beware that I-25 and US-85 will be rough. We’re planning on driving to Wyoming around 3am from Fort Collins, and even then I’m expecting heavy traffic.
We have changed our plans AGAIN. SE Nebraska and NE Kansas look to be cloudy/thundersotrmy. So we are leaving earlier and our goal now is Grand Island NE. It’s not perfect either, but better than anything else we will be able to reach in time.
Good viewing to all!
Saw it at my place of employment–a building near Nashville International Airport.
The tower, landing strips, taxiways & planes lit up, in advance, like it was nighttime.
It became noticeably cooler, & the locusts kicked up a fuss.
I was at a friend’s farm east of Nashville. It was great - some intermittent cloud cover before totality, but 2.5 minutes of clear view for the totality. The fireflies came out when it got dark, and the horses came up from the back pasture. It was amazing to me how even just a tiny sliver of the sun still illuminated the day - until a few minutes before totality, you couldn’t really tell much difference in the daylight. but the moment of totality hit like flipping a switch. The corona was very cool. And there was hot fudge ice cream cake afterwards!
StG
We drove down to my parents’ house in Royston GA then carpooled along with them to my sister’s house just across the South Carolina border.
Frighteningly threatening array of clouds arrived from approx 1/4 coverage to 3/4 and I was sourly anticipating (based on how thick those clouds were and how they’d shown up out of nowhere) that we were going to miss the main event, but they blew over and we have clear viewing after that.
Amazing how with even the tiniest fragmentary band of uncovered sun remaining, and the lawn becoming dark and the air cooler, I could still take off the eclipse glasses and find that NO it’s still way too bright to glance at. But once the last bit of sun disappeared behind the moon’s shadow, “Take off the glasses…WOW!” Some things you really do have to see in person. Photographs and video doesn’t do it justice. There’s something eerie and imposingly 3 dimensional about that black orb surrounded by corona that just doesn’t come across in photos. Something powerful when it’s overhead in your sky. Totally worth the 2 days’ driving time from New York, nasty traffic included.
Don’t have photos, didn’t waste any of the totality time tryng to futz with my camera.
I missed the 1970 eclipse due to weather. I was 11 at the time and extremely uhhappy to be cheated out of seeing it. I’ve been waiting for this for 47 year. Actually 49 counting the 2 years’ of childhood anticipation, in fact.
Yeah, the moment that first “diamond ring” dot appeared after totality, it was immediately like “Ack! Bright light!” and shades back on 
I didn’t get to see totality, only about 98.5%, but to me the coolest thing wasn’t even in the sky. It was the thousands of images of the eclipse on the ground. I have a very wooded lot and my driveway was covered in these natural pinhole viewers. I had never seen (or heard of) this phenomenon before and was completely blown away.
Oh, I had glasses and watched the “real” eclipse as well, but the shadows were just as awesome.
Finally a chance to write something, after driving 12 hours after the eclipse and a full day of classes today.
We stayed Sunday night in Lincoln and drove 54 miles west to York to meet up with my sister. The traffic on I-80 was heavy but moving at normal speed. As the eclipse started, York started clouding up, but there were clear skies north and west, so we hopped in our cars and drove 25 miles cross-country to Aurora Nebraska. Totality was approaching so we pulled into a bowling alley parking lot next to a McDonald’s. (They were walking the parking lot handing out water, and they let their employees out during totality - very nice of McDonald’s to do so.)
Even though it was still slightly overcast, all of a sudden it cleared quite a bit, and we had a wonderful view of totality. There’s a thread about clouds dissipating during an eclipse, which is what we observed.
It was amazing! Dark overhead with light on the horizon, street lights on, cooling weather. We should have taken a picture of the temporary highway sign “Turn on lights during eclipse”.
I’d say we were overjoyed. And it was nice to do it with family too. We had a nice lady take family pictures of all eight of us in our glasses. Then we saw some city of Aurora eclipse t-shirts and got those as souvenirs; that just seemed appropriate.
The drive home to Minnesota was a bit long but manageable. We drove cross-country across Nebraska, avoiding I-80. Besides hitting a severe thunderstorm near Yankton SD, we had pretty decent traffic, especially after the traffic split back to Omaha.
Can’t wait for the next one…
We drove to Hopkinsville, KY, and wound up on the front lawn of some locals plus about 30 others. We were the only two who’d ever seen a previous eclipse, so we helped correct a lot of misconceptions and stuff they’d never heard of. Like the aforementioned crescent shadows on the driveway, and the 360-degree “sunset” during Totality. One guy flatly asserted that the scientists had it timed all wrong, that Totality would occur later than predicted. He bet me $100, so a minute before Totality I started counting down, and the “diamond ring” flashed exactly as I reached “zero”, followed by Totality a small fraction of a second later. The guy said I must be some kind of wizard.
To see the next one, we’ll just have to step outside and look up.
It’s amazing how impressed some people are with the fact that (a) basic orbital mechanics works, and (b) we have accurate clocks! 
OTOH, maybe you do have wizard powers and caused the eclipse by intentionally offending the Sun God Ra!
You and I made similar trips! I stayed in Omaha Sunday night after coming down from Minnesota, where I had just moved back to from Missouri three weeks ago.
I ended up right about halfway between terrible and great luck with the patchy clouds as I drove around like a madman on dirt roads near Dunbar, NE trying to find a clear spot. Three minutes before totality I reached a clear spot between the clouds, and pulled over. But it moved! During totality it was hazy but I could still see the disc of the sun with my eyes and no glasses. By the end of totality it had gotten so thick there was nothing to see at that spot in the sky, although it was still really wild to see something that looked like a sunset on the horizon in every direction. (Also wild for a freaking bat to choose that time to take up residence in my heating/cooling system: see below.) Then on the way back it was bumper-to-bumper and sometimes standstill traffic on the country roads going north, with insane lines for bathrooms at gas stations. I avoided I-80 but ended up wondering if that had been a mistake.
I wish I had seen, and shared, this CNET eclipse article before Monday.
Despite having planned for this eclipse since June 2012, there are three things in here I had not known, at least not fully.
Two of them appear in the #1 item. I knew, and argued to anyone I could talk to about it, that there was a world of difference between 99% and totality. But I’m still surprised to learn that the difference in the light is 10,000 times greater at 99% compared to 100%. And although I didn’t know that exact number while watching the eclipse, it really was dramatic.
The other item in #1 makes a weird and unpleasant occurrence on Monday now seem not to be the incredible coincidence I thought. What were the odds, I wondered, that a bat decided to lodge itself into my cars ventilation/heat/AC system right at the peak of the eclipse? Googling an occurrence of bats infestation in the roof of a car turned up no hits, no matter how I designed the search or how many pages of results I went through. Everything was about bats getting into the walls or roof of a house, which I have also experienced. And then for this incredibly rare thing to happen right during totality? Well, it turns out that this was no great coincidence at all, and the rarity is a function of the rarity of total eclipses.
So now I have a bonus interesting eclipse-related anecdote, but it was incredibly stressful to drive the car down the interstate with that thing fluttering around in there and wondering if it was going to squeeze its way out while I was driving. I would like to think of myself as the kind of guy with nerves of steel who would calmly pull over to the side of the road, or just roll down the window to let it fly away, but I’m afraid I would reflexively start swatting and freaking out, and maybe wreck at 80 mph. I decided to crank up the heat at a rest area and stand outside the car for a while with the windows rolled down, and I never heard it after that–so it either escaped while I was distracted by my phone, or it died in there. I should have probably left the windows rolled up so I could verify if it got out…but too late now. I am going to have to get a mechanic to fish around in there, because it can’t be healthy to have a dead mammal in your air delivery system.
I think I may have hit the same severe thunderstorm you did, but further south as I was on I-29 in western Iowa, by the Omaha Reservation where my grandmother grew up. I took refuge in the casino, and the manager bought me dinner after I told him that he and I might be cousins.
Oh, almost forgot: The other thing I’m surprised I didn’t hear about in advance is the 360° sunset/sunrise effect. I see it now in this article, and one of the people they interviewed on NPR during totality was exclaiming amazement about it; but the eclipseheads I read seemed to focus so much on the corona that maybe they missed that part. (It also requires having a view of the horizon in every direction, which was not a problem in the middle of rural Nebraska.) And if it had been a clear day, maybe I would have missed it too–so that’s the silver lining of it being partly overcast where I was, that halfway through totality I could no longer see the sun at all, and looked around me instead of straight up.
The account I posted to Facebook, edited to protect the guilty and innocent.
My wife’s uncle, an astronomer, and his wife, an archeologist, have seen at least 11 eclipses before this one. Well in advance, uncle had determined that Troy, KS, quite close to the centerline, might be a good viewing location, and was less likely to be enormously crowded than St. Joseph, a few miles to the east. On Friday, they drove down from their home in Wisconsin to my brother-in-law’s house in Overland Park, KS, and stopped in Troy to scout it. We knew that Troy was going to have activities and let people view from their fairgrounds, but that site turned out to be quite small, and only provided porta-potties for restrooms.
While getting information at the court house, aunt happened to meet a very nice woman who was impressed by aunt and uncles’s eclipse experience, the amount of equipment they had brought with which to view it, and the range of ages in our party, from my wife’s 5-year-old nephew to my 87-year-old mother. The woman offered to let us come to her house, a mile or so from the center of town, sitting on top of a hill. We could use her bathroom instead of a porta-potty, a great relief for many in our party.
This amazing offer eliminated many of the uncertainties we had been facing: where exactly to set up, what parking and facilities would be available, how to make sure that the three vehicles in our party would be able to meet up if there were terrible traffic jams, etc. And when we finally saw her house on Sunday afternoon, it was amazing: the location was on a hill with a clear view in all directions, a spacious property, and a lovely house that had been built only three years ago. You simply could not have asked for a more perfect place to view an eclipse.
The family was very gracious and hospitable to us, and a few other of their family members and friends joined during the day.
On Monday morning we set out from Overland Park before 7 a.m to avoid potential traffic jams, a fear that turned out to be unfounded. We avoided I-29, the usual route one would take, assuming that it was likely to be clogged by the 100K-200K people expected to watch from the airport in St. Joe. However, Google Maps showed I-29 was clear as late as 8:30, when we arrived in Troy. There was no traffic on the route we took, either.
Although the skies were cloudy and the forecast wasn’t great, the option of chasing clear skies wasn’t considered, given the size of our group and the otherwise excellent location into which we had stumbled. The eclipsing sun poked through the clouds sporadically, so we were able to see each phase of the eclipse, sometimes using the clouds as filter, other times needing our glasses.
I had planned to shoot a wide angle time lapse with my DSLR, unattended, but that would have been pointless in the circumstances, so I borrowed the 300mm lens aunt had brought and grabbed a few shots through the clouds when the opportunity presented itself. Similarly, the two telescopes aunt and uncle had brought for safe viewing were set up but never used. I set my little point-and-shoot camera to record video of us and our reactions a few minutes before totality.
Despite nearly total cloud cover, the 2:40 of totality was still incredible, the depth of the darkness being much greater than I had expected. A street light 100 yards away from the house came on; the effect of “sunset” in all directions was remarkable; the whole party was amazed and delighted.
Although I had been worried that traffic might be a problem getting back to the Kansas City Airport in time for our 7 pm flight, that turned out not to be an issue. We had hours to spare. However, the thunderstorms that came through that evening did delay our flight for about three hours.
In short, our first eclipse was, to use a much abused word, AWESOME! I now perfectly understand why people chase eclipses, and am strongly tempted to start myself, maybe even before 2024.
My sentiments exactly! My wife and 5 year old daughter flew into Seattle the week before and then we drove down into Eastern OR in our rented camper van. We found a secluded spot on Saturday on a forest service road about an hour’s drive off the main highway and just kicked back there until the big event. It surpassed my expectations and even our 2:03 of totality went too fast. A few seconds after it got dark we were treated to coyotes yipping/howling off in the distance. I’m already thinking about plans for 2019.
Yes, this. We were in the path of max time of totality and it was still too short, seemed like an eye-blink! I got some neat pictures and a couple little videos of about 10 seconds each. I’m thinking of stitching the videos together and putting them on a loop so I can relieve the experience a little longer. Amazing.
I hate them. I hate all of them.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk
I wonder what the population is of the crossover of totality.
Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk