Getting the van packed in preparation to head to Leakey Texas tomorrow morning. We're going to stop in Milford, Utah tomorrow night, then we have a hotel room in ABQ for Friday night. Drives Friday and Saturday are a bit over 10 hours, so my daughter and I are going to take turns driving. We actually found a hotel about 25 miles from the site for Saturday night. If we get there early enough, I plan to take a shower and have them drop me and my gear off at the site for Saturday night, and let them spend the night in the hotel. If we don't get to Leakey before sunset, they won't let us in, so I'll stay at the hotel. So Sunday night is the only night we HAVE to camp, because Monday afternoon, we plan to drive a couple hours back toward ABQ to spend the night in another hotel we have reservations for. That will shorten the drive to ABQ so we can visit a friend who used to live on our street in L.A. Then Wednesday it's back to Milford, where I'll telework for a few days while we get the place opened up for my wife's field archaeology class in June.
I'm bringing the Seestar, a couple laptops (work and personal), my Tak Epsilon 130, and a couple cameras. Mostly, I'll image on Sunday night if it's clear, but if I can set the mirrorless cameras to do time lapses during the ecllipse, I'll piggyback them on the Tak and image with telephotos to try to get corona out a couple radii from the sun. My mirrorless cameras are modern, but I use old Konica glass with adapters on both of them (an Olympus EM5ii and a Panasonic Lumix S5). My favorite lens is a Konica Hexanon AR Varifocal 35-100mm f/2.8. Sucker takes an 82mm filter!). It's heavy, but the camera mount for the Tak is beefy, and can be pointed in az and el with a couple hand knobs. My other favorite lens for the Oly is an old Meyer Optik 300mm f/4 lens with an Exakta external bayonet mount, but I managed to leave it in Cosmic Acres! so I've got a very nice Konica 135mm f/3.2 (I think). It and the 35-100 are probably too short for the eclipse, though, unless I use a 2x teleconverter (because I also managed to leave my 200mm Konica lens at Cosmic!). Mostly, I plan to image at night of course. And only image the eclipse if I can do time lapses and not have to fiddle with cameras during the eclipse.
-Tim.
