Wrong (mostly minor):
Drive to Indianapolis, which should have been 3 hours, was almost doubled - rain and likely eclipse traffic. When we left to start the drive, I stopped at Harbor Freight near my house to pick up a cable that I would need to power my laptop from a battery/inverter, only to find that they didn't carry it anymore. I ended up having to buy a small battery charger that included the cable I needed. To top it off, I didn't need to use it at all as I was able to minimize my laptop use in the field.
My plan to wait out traffic at a local Walmart parking lot until late Monday night fell through after the area it was in seemed shady. Ended up going back to the hotel and renting a room for an additional night and left at midnight. Left my laptop charger in the 2nd room, and the hotel hasn't found it.
Google maps may have lied regarding how much traffic there was on my route back home (more later).
My timing to manually start the sky stack scripts for capturing the eclipse was a bit off for C2 and C3, so I didn't capture the Bailey's beads and diamond ring shots I expected to get, although I did at least 1 good one of each.
Annoyingly, all of the 1/60 sec exposures on my camera (Nikon D3500) suffer from mirror slap distortion in the vertical plane - the diamond ring and corona out to .2 R images exhibit "ghosts" of the lunar limb (and prominences) at the top and bottom of the moon.
Right:
Cloud cover was thin and high clouds. I didn't think they were that bad, but looking at a few pictures taken just before C2 showed it to be more extensive than I thought. Fortunately, it did not have a major impact on my photos (other the corona details being muted). cleardarksky.com predictions came through again!
My photos came out well for the most part. Focusing was sufficient and didn't change between C1 and C2.
The parking lot I observed from was on the next street over from the hotel - and hardly used. Maybe about 20 people present for the eclipse, and I had a nice unobstructed view. I got there at the same time that the attendant had arrived, and was only charged the normal $7 parking rate for the lot. The attendant told me I was lucky - they were to charge $20 for parking due to the special event, but since she wasn't setup yet in the booth I got the price that the self-pay station charged.
The drive home starting at midnight EDT was traffic-free, and I got home in about the normal 3 hour drive time. Google Maps kept showing a backup about halfway there, which turned out to be false. When I got to the area that was supposed to be backed up and checked it again, the map suddenly updated to show no traffic delays at all.
The prominences! Easily visible in the viewfinder of the camera and the naked-eye prominence at approx. 6 o'clock position was exceptional.
Overall, a highly successful trip to view the eclipse with my son.
Edited by DrkNite, 11 April 2024 - 07:23 PM.