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A group of mainly Mexicans and friends had a great morning together out west on the Mulligan Highway. Was also great to be joined by a few others on IIS who had seen my post when they were looking for last minute options which added to the group atmosphere.
Skies were clear through the night, aside from just a little low cloud around midnight, so we had been fairly relaxed about the weather but at sunrise thin high cloud became visible across most of the sky and particularly in the east.
The visual view of the eclipse was spellbinding and beautiful, but the cloud has affected corona imaging a great deal. Despite all the testing (even during the night), my scripts also didn't function as they did reliably in practise, but the most important bits were ok. Happily though I didn't look at the cameras much during totality, and having seen one eclipse previously I found I could take much more in this time.
At 2nd and 3rd contact the light seemed to flicker slowly (a bit like aperture flicker in a timelapse) as well as (I think) spotting some much faster shadow bands rippling on the ground in front of me. I think having an eclipse low in the sky also benefits from the 'moon illusion' with the corona seeming larger than I remember from 11 years ago with the eclipse high in a clear blue sky.
In binoculars there were some beautiful prominences, and I was surprised by how much their position and visibility changed during the two minutes.
An award of some sort goes to the driver zooming along the Mulligan Highway (away from the sun) as though nothing unusual was happening, despite being less than two minutes from second contact with the light already very weird and fading fast. Who does that?? Were they going to turn their lights on to keep driving through totality!!?
Hope you like these few images. The corona extent is very limited and subtle detail lost, but I'm very happy with some of the prominences and details at second and third contact imaged at 1300mm. I have some nice sequences of these showing the changes over 10 seconds or so at each end.
Given the highly uncertain nature of eclipse chasing, it was a great morning!
Phil
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