So I crawled out of bed at 3 AM and wandered on up to Mackay, Idaho and parked myself next to the Mackay Reservoir, just a few miles from the centerline of the path of totality. The hour or so it took for the moon to crawl across the sun was interesting; but the actual period of totality was really quite remarkable. Perhaps most remarkable of all was that while it was getting perceptibly dimmer as more and more of the sun was covered up, the sunlight wasn’t really qualitatively different until that last tiniest sliver of sunlight was *gone.* If I’d been just a few dozen yards outside the path of totality, the experience would have been *wholly* different.
Unsurprisingly I took a bunch of photos. They are… ehhh. I think the best was actually taken with the old camera, showing both the foreground and the eclipsed sun in the sky. The sky really does go night-time dark; the sun itself is black (there being a moon in front of it) and the corona is obvious. The end result is that it looks like a friggen’ hole in the sky.
Below are some of the better photos. You can see some sunspots… and you can see that with the telephoto lens, I just can’t dial in a precise focus. I suspect it might be a bug in the lens.
