Saturday, August 19, 2017

Waiting Patiently for Eclipse

We arrived at base camp for Project Stratoclipse, a farm in Marshall, Missouri, on Thursday evening and have been busy preparing for Monday's big event ever since. I am still refining my technique for capturing the eclipse but in the mean time I'm taking a break from the sun and reviewing some of the other images I've captured in the past few days.

Most of these have very little editing, just some basic tweaks to brightness and color, so later on (i.e., after the eclipse) I'll go through all my shots in detail and post (or repost) the best once after I've had time to take a closer look at them and do some fine tuning.

What's amazing is how much less light pollution there is here than at home. Marshall's not a large town but it's also not that far from places like Kansas City, Springfield, etc. so I was a little surprised at how dark the skies are... it has a Bortle Scale of 4 compared to 8 for home (Mesquite, Texas). That's a huge difference!

Enjoy! We're less than 48 hours from the eclipse!

Sunset the first night. This is a high dynamic range (HDR) image
created by combining 3 images taken at different exposures.

Same tractor, this time with Milky Way instead of the Sun. 

Last night we got hit by a thunderstorm but it was pretty mild.
However, after it rolled by us it really exploded with activity.
We watched it carry on like this for a half-hour or more. 

The storm was still going on but had moved far enough to the
south-east for our skies to clear, allowing me to capture both the
distant storm and the Milky Way. 

A similar view of the storm in the distance with the Milky Way
rising above farm equipment. 

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