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momijizukamori) wrote2024-04-09 09:10 pm
momijizukamori) wrote2024-04-09 09:10 pm
Entry tags:
Eclipse 2024 pt 1
So I'd attribute yesterday's success to a combo of good luck (surprise good weather), pre-planning (which means I had ALL THE THINGS in my car and was out of the house before 9am), local knowledge, and flexibility.
The latter two meant that after I picked my dad up (who is the one with the local knowledge), we were able to adjust our plan on the fly, which ultimately meant we ditched any of my pre-planned location possibilities, and just decided to head towards the zone of totality on the back state highways. I don't know that we saved all that much time, compared to taking the much more packed interstates, but it was definitely a less stressful, more interesting drive, largely through woods or rural NH and VT towns. I saved this Spotify playlist for offline listening, which turned out to be a good call because cell coverage got pretty spotty in a lot of the drive.
When we were just south of St. Johnsbury, VT, with about an hour to go before the partial phase started, my dad spotted a sign for eclipse parking outside a church just off the road, and after I double-checked my eclipse app to make sure we were far enough to get totality, we decided it was as good a place as any to start. The caretaker who was there for the day said that parking was free, and the view was pretty good, so we joined the people already setting up their lawn chairs and camera equipment.
It wasn't a massive crowd, though by the time the partial phase started, the dirt parking lot was very full. Definitely seemed to be all sorts of people - families with kids, people on their own, people from nearby, people who drove even farther than us. The older couple next to us with a small telescope set-up had driven from NH - their original plan had been upstate NY, but the weather forecast was for clouds out that way, so they had changed plans. Someone else had come from the direction of Boston, and when my dad asked if they had taken I-93, their answer was 'Unfortunately yes'.
While the initial partial phase was going, there was a certain amount of wandering, intermittently looking up with eclipse glasses on, adjusting my camera position, etc. The couple with the telescope has a plate set up to project the image on to, which was neat, and someone else had brought a colander and a sheet of posterboard to project the changing silhouettes onto.
Totality was... something else, really. It gets dark, yes, but not in any of the ways you'd expect. It's not dark light nighttime, or dark like a very cloudy day. It's dark like someone has hit a dimmer switch on the world. You can still see, and shadows are still crisp like they would be on an otherwise clear day, but everything is just... darker. People talk about animals behaving weirdly during totality, and humans are certainly animals too - I know part of how I felt was probably down to running on not enough sleep, but my dad said he also felt a little weird too. I'd probably describe it as 'unreal' - he said 'anti-gravitational', which I think also works. Sort of... slightly untethered for that minute fifteen seconds.
The bulk of people cleared out after totality ended, but I wanted to test my camera battery life, and maybe get a full series of both ends of the eclipse to do a cool timelapse or composite photo with, so we packed up slowly while the camera automation ran, and were one of maybe three groups to stay until the very end. It was really heartening to see that everyone cleaned up after themselves - you'd have been hard-pressed to guess how many people had been there an hour before when we left. The drive back was also uneventful - slightly more cars here and there but my dad thought it was mostly 'people coming home from work' traffic rather than post-eclipse traffic.
I'll do another post about my photo setup and share some of the photos in a day or two, when I've had time to finish editing them!
The latter two meant that after I picked my dad up (who is the one with the local knowledge), we were able to adjust our plan on the fly, which ultimately meant we ditched any of my pre-planned location possibilities, and just decided to head towards the zone of totality on the back state highways. I don't know that we saved all that much time, compared to taking the much more packed interstates, but it was definitely a less stressful, more interesting drive, largely through woods or rural NH and VT towns. I saved this Spotify playlist for offline listening, which turned out to be a good call because cell coverage got pretty spotty in a lot of the drive.
When we were just south of St. Johnsbury, VT, with about an hour to go before the partial phase started, my dad spotted a sign for eclipse parking outside a church just off the road, and after I double-checked my eclipse app to make sure we were far enough to get totality, we decided it was as good a place as any to start. The caretaker who was there for the day said that parking was free, and the view was pretty good, so we joined the people already setting up their lawn chairs and camera equipment.
It wasn't a massive crowd, though by the time the partial phase started, the dirt parking lot was very full. Definitely seemed to be all sorts of people - families with kids, people on their own, people from nearby, people who drove even farther than us. The older couple next to us with a small telescope set-up had driven from NH - their original plan had been upstate NY, but the weather forecast was for clouds out that way, so they had changed plans. Someone else had come from the direction of Boston, and when my dad asked if they had taken I-93, their answer was 'Unfortunately yes'.
While the initial partial phase was going, there was a certain amount of wandering, intermittently looking up with eclipse glasses on, adjusting my camera position, etc. The couple with the telescope has a plate set up to project the image on to, which was neat, and someone else had brought a colander and a sheet of posterboard to project the changing silhouettes onto.
Totality was... something else, really. It gets dark, yes, but not in any of the ways you'd expect. It's not dark light nighttime, or dark like a very cloudy day. It's dark like someone has hit a dimmer switch on the world. You can still see, and shadows are still crisp like they would be on an otherwise clear day, but everything is just... darker. People talk about animals behaving weirdly during totality, and humans are certainly animals too - I know part of how I felt was probably down to running on not enough sleep, but my dad said he also felt a little weird too. I'd probably describe it as 'unreal' - he said 'anti-gravitational', which I think also works. Sort of... slightly untethered for that minute fifteen seconds.
The bulk of people cleared out after totality ended, but I wanted to test my camera battery life, and maybe get a full series of both ends of the eclipse to do a cool timelapse or composite photo with, so we packed up slowly while the camera automation ran, and were one of maybe three groups to stay until the very end. It was really heartening to see that everyone cleaned up after themselves - you'd have been hard-pressed to guess how many people had been there an hour before when we left. The drive back was also uneventful - slightly more cars here and there but my dad thought it was mostly 'people coming home from work' traffic rather than post-eclipse traffic.
I'll do another post about my photo setup and share some of the photos in a day or two, when I've had time to finish editing them!
no subject
Ooh that is super cool! Wish I'd set plans up to go see it now; the partial several years back I found mildly unsettling, like being in a video game render. Looking forward to the photos!
no subject
Yeah total is very weird - not unpleasantly so, but it was unexpected for sure.
The next NA one isn't for another few years, but there's some good travel destinations in the next decade - Iceland and Spain in 2026, and Australia and New Zealand in 2028 ;)
no subject
Definitely some great travel destinations to consider :D
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that's as good a description of the weird darkness as any. i also found that everything was weirdly sharp, but that might have just been the sharpness of observing differently.
no subject
Hard to say! I was too busy going 'WHOA am I going to fall over?' and worrying about my camera in the seventy-five seconds we had, so I'm very 'I need more data!!!!' haha
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I started the editing process, and there's def things I would do differently in a hypothetical 'next time' but overall I'm /really/ happy with how my first go at astrophotography turned out :)
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Honestly I was mostly going 'wait why the fuck does it feel like I'm going to fall over' but yeah it's definitely pretty Peak Weird. I did get some good photos, though I haven't finished all the editing yet (did you know PSDs can only be a max of 2GB? Guess how I know!), which is why there hasn't been a followup photo post, heh.
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It's okay, they have a larger document format (PSB). Apparently PSDs are limited to that size because of some of the file structure, and changing that would break compatibility with older PSDs, so - PSB it is.
(it's something like 120 twelve megapixel images, each on a seperate layer, because I want to do a timelapse animation with them)
no subject