Eclipse

8/20 - 8/21/17

Knoxville and view point off Cherohala Skyway
The eclipse has been on my calendar for more than a year. About 6 months ago, we booked a hotel room in Knoxville with the idea that it would give us more options depending on the weather. We would either drive south towards Tellico Plains (TN) or drive west towards Nashville, hopefully we would be able to find a hole in the clouds to see the eclipse. The weather forecast looked good, so we drove down to Knoxville the night before the eclipse.

We saw the Sunsphere (made famous by a Simpsons episode).

The kids played in the water park

And we went to bed too late and woke up too early to try to beat traffic. Originally, I had hoped that I was picking an out of the way place, but as the eclipse date got closer and more people started mentioning it, I realized that my spot was likely to be crowded. We got to the overlook about 10am, managed to find a spot to drop chairs, blanket and cooler and I drove up the road to find a spot to park. Luckily I did not have to go far. I got back to the family and my son asked about the eclipse glasses. Back to the car. I later went back to the car to get the big umbrella for a little bit of shade.

I played with my cellphone and the solar glasses, not too bad.

I also played with my SLR and the solar viewer.

Cool shadows on the road.

All set for totality

Here it comes

A took a minute and ran off a bunch of exposures on my SLR. Unfortunately, the focus had slipped a little bit, so no great photos (I wasn't really expecting greatness anyway).

I don't know why the video shows up so small, but it looks fine on the full screen view.

After totality, we packed up and headed back home. Traffic ended up not being too bad, but there were a lot of people on I-75.

It was a truly awesome experience. In retrospect, I wish I had not bothered with my SLR during totality or maybe just a couple exposures. The 2:30 minutes went by way too fast to spend much time with a camera.