The Solar Eclipse Miracle!

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The April 8th 2024 Solar Eclipse turned into a Miracle!
The weather forecast just 3 or 4 days prior predicted heavy thunderstorms with almost a 0% chance of any clear skies in Southern Texas.
The past weather history had shown Texas with the best chance of clear skies and places like New York and Maine with the most chance for clouds. Well for the 4 day stretch around the Eclipse the forecast had flip flopped from history, and now Maine was showing 0% clouds and Texas was showing near 100% chance of clouds.
Many of my friends who were going to go to Texas changed their plans last minute and instead went to Indianna and Arkansas which were now forecasting mostly clear skies for the Eclipse. I decided to just keep my reservations for Texas since I had also wanted for years to see the famous Texas Bluebonnet flowers!
The night before the eclipse there was clear skies. Many of us spent the night with our telescopes capturing various galaxies and nebula's. But then the clouds came in. They would partially clear, creating pockets of clearing where the sun could pop out. It was this constant cat and mouse game with the sun all morning. And just as Totality was about to commence, this huge dark and ominous cloud floated over the sun, totally blocking the sun!
The ground around us got darker and darker, so we knew totality was happening, we just couldn't see it. That cloud was so thick and massive!
And then the miracle happened! For about 14 seconds, the clouds parted, totality could be seen! Everyone was cheering and camera's were clicking! And after those 14 seconds, the cloud covered the sun again, and we didn't see the sun again for another 5 or 6 minutes.
So our planned 4 minutes and 30 seconds of Totality turned into 14 seconds of Totality, but not a person complained. It had seemed for a moment we wouldn't be able to see totality at all, and we got a little miracle that gave us 14 seconds of a window into the Totality of the Solar Eclipse.
Part of the miracle is also my cameras. I had 2 telescopes and 4 cameras trained on the Solar Eclipse. Despite my hours of practice and preparation, the eclipse turned into a comedy of errors. My best camera was on an astro mount so that it could track with the sun, which it did until right at Totality when the clutch on it slipped and that camera ended up pointing at the ground instead of the sun. Another camera switched from shooting horizontal formats to vertical after Totality. One of the telescopes that had a timelapse feature so it would take a photo every 2 seconds and then stack it into a timelapse video ended up not stacking the images properly. The images were not lined up when stacked, so I had to strip all of the images out of the video and by hand I had to realign thousands of images. That one I am still working on. But despite all of the issues, I still captured the Eclipse! Assembling this video took a lot longer than I would have thought, it's been 3 weeks. But I finally have it compiled.
And finally I want to thank Explore Scientific! They had such a reasonable deal for the campsites. I was able to stay 4 nights and 5 days for the same price most hotels were charging for 1 night! It was such a great experience, and I would gladly go and hang out with them again.
I hope you enjoy the video, and congrats if you read this far! :)
Jim
#amazing #awesome #solareclipse #eclipse #solar #eclipse2024 #discover #eclipseviewing #explore #telescope #zwo #nikon #nikond850 #nikonz8 #nikond810 #timelapse #timelapsevideo #texas #leakey #explorescientific

[@user-bs9ee5zy5l]

Awesome Job Jim! Yes such a miracle!! So cool!!!

[@user-bg3uh4wc9i]

Wow! So amazing you got to see that!!