Eclipse from Machans Beach, just North of Cairns airport
Ok... Well I'm buggered. Not been home (Adelaide) long from my lightning trip to Cairns - I almost spent as much time traveling as being there! 14 hours total travel, 16 hours total in Cairns! But certainly well worth it.
After deciding only a month ago to head up, and being a busy time at work, I could only take one day off. My initial plan was to arrive in the evening and hire a car to drive to a site but that went pear shaped after EVERY car hire place in Cairns was booked out! So I decided to pick a place right near the airport and catch a taxi there and stay up all night observing (and walk back the next morning if it was too busy!). I asked Hertz at the airport and they had a no-show so I got a cheaper 4WD Prado! I'm actually buying an earlier model of it so it was like a test drive! Excellent. Ended up driving round to my site 10km from Cairns, south east Machans Beach (a sand spit facing SE at the mouth of the Barron River). I had googled this location and it looked like it would have nice scenery as well as being secluded and therefore away from the main observing beaches with the hordes.
When I arrived there about 10pm it was raining and overcast so I was so thankful I got a car to shelter in! Ended up dosing a little waiting for 4.30am to set up my gear. As with most nearby locations it was patchy at that time so I headed down to the beach (above the high tide mark!) and picked a spot out of the wind. As the sky lightened to sunrise there were patches of clear sky but it was evident I'd miss 1st contact. Got some nice sunrise pics tho! Not long after I got a few 1/4 disk shots through cloud. And of course it started to rain... light then heavier off and on, and while I was trying to image as it was clearing near the horizon. These things are made to test us I know. Lucky I had the brolly that was able to shelter both cameras (my sacrifice was a wet back). Got a series of shots up to about 2/3 of the way to 2nd contact then a bit more cloud and rain!
At 7 minutes before totality a huge clear patch emerged, the rain stopped and got many shots with both cameras leading up to and past totality! Wow! So amazing that it was clear after the lead up! and what an amazing site. I saw the 2002 near Woomera and I'd forgotten how amazing one is.
If you didn't want a large crowd around but still be close to Cairns then the beach SE of Machans Beach was the place to be! There would have been only 20-30 people along a stretch of a few hundred metres.
I left planning of imaging fairly late before the trip but managed to get two practice sessions in. Even with that I didn't take all the images of what I wanted but then again I got to see it naked eye more and images of the second minute worked out great!
I had my Nikon D800E with Nikon 80-200 f2.8 and 1.7x TC (340mm total) on a tripod for more coronal shots. Also had a Nikon D7000 with Sigma 50-500 and Kenko 2x TC to give the extra reach (of the DX body crop factor) of 1500mm equivalent mounted on a Polarie. I had planned a couple of wide shots but ran out of time since the initial exposures were way off and wasted time adjusting. Anyway I got some great shots (I think!) of totality showing the prominences and Bailey's Beads and the diamond ring. As Paul Haese mentioned seeing wasn't great and I wonder if that's why some images I took weren't that sharp (or I was a little off focus!).
The below images are straight out of the camera, except for cropping. All except the last one are D7000, 1000mm, f16, ISO 400 (small aperture due to 2x converter) with:
