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Should have stayed in Jackson?
Sorry to hear about the tech problems.
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Thanks Pete.
They were finger problems on my part not tech problems. Can't blame the camera for failure to remove a filter. Combination of fatigue and distractions. Pity, I had the camera technique for close ups worked out so that 3 clicks of a dial and 4 presses of the cable release captured every shutter speed from 1/8000 to 8 seconds. Focussed carefully about 90s before totality. The problem is that being so simple, I didn't look at the camera during totality. hence didn't pick up my error.
Regarding weather & the decision to move, hindsight is a wonderful thing but the reality is making a choice beforehand. At 3am on eclipse morning, Bengt& I looked at the College of Dubois NAMNEST cluster. We looked at the simulated IR satellite photo output. It was as far as we could tell given the map scales, identical to the current real time 3am IR satellite photo showing 2 bands of clouds moving across east Idaho into west Wyoming. So we felt it had the best handle on the current situation. Running the model forward showed it moving across IDaho towards Jackson stalling and beginning to break up over Jackson Teton around eclipse time. When forwarded to eclipse time, it showed some clouds hanging around Teton/Jackson. A 100mi westward shift put us into completely clear air. We had tickets to go to Rendezvous Mountain (10500 ft) and our condo was walking distance from the base station so we didn't make the decision to move lightly. Going up the mountain meant a risk of an obscured or hazy eclipse with the reward of a spectacular high altitude view. I explained this risk/reward choice to our group of about 40 people(the Tony Crocker and Liz O'Mara group) the night before the eclipse and we emailed out a final weather summary at 4am before choosing to leave ourselves. Many of the group chose to go up the mountain with Tony and Liz and fortunately, it did clear for them. Going west meant dropping to a lower altitude but a guarantee of clear sky. We chose the latter and we're happy with our choice.
One spectacular effect we saw was that prior to totality, the Tetons were obscured by smoke. When we and then the smoke were obscured by the umbra, the absence of light hitting the scattering particles resulted in the Tetons suddenly becoming visible. They lit up as though someone switched on the lights. Fantastic!
Traffic
We drove 105mi west. I think we left at 4:45am arrived in the area around 6:45am, stuck to the speed limits all the way. Can't say I noticed any traffic that slowed us down at all.
Coming home was a bit different. We were 3 miles west of the I15. People jumped in their cars and traffic was banked up from the I15 three miles back to our location and perhaps another 0.5-1 mile west towards Terreton from about 5 mins after totality onwards. We stayed until C4 then ate a lunch we'd packed. The traffic queue varied from 3-4 miles as traffic from farther west arrived in pulses. The attached panorama was taken 30 mins after totality.
However this was being caused by a road works flagman at the I15. Why they chose that day to work there is beyond me. We left our site from a side road to this queue at about 2pm, someone let us in straight away. It took about 3/4 of an hour to clear this 3 mile jam then it was a clear run for the next 97 miles all the way back to Teton. Because I was tired and the only registered driver for the rental car, we took several rest/coffee breaks along the way, plus several photo stops as we approached the west side of the Tetons. I think we got back after about 3 hrs.
Joe