The solar eclipse, as recorded from a partial eclipse point of view

I didn't get truly excited about yesterday's solar eclipse until the last possible moment -- an hour before it started on Monday. So, no, I didn't try to rent a super-zoom lens and/or haul a couple hundred miles west to mid-America to witness and/or photograph this last such astrological event to bless mid-America until some 300 years from now. 

But when the excitement did hit me Monday morning, right around noon EDT, I decided to give it as good of an effort as I possibly could. And for me, that meant using my tripod, my Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens (the longest reaching lens in my gear arsenal), my Canon 6D with the frame image size set to Large (so as to preserve as much resolution and image quality as possible after expected radical cropping in post-processing) and strapped an eclipse-safe filter over the glass on the lens.

1:48 p.m.

1:58 p.m.

From the point the moon took its first bite out of the sun, I decided to try and grab a new shot (showing the gradual increasing bites) every 8 to 10 minutes. That started just before 2 p.m. in Raleigh when the moon took its first bite out of the sun ... and lasted until 4:23 p.m., when I grabbed the last photo showing the tiniest bite as the sun prepared to return to shining in its usual full glory.

Based on what I noticed in my photos and those of others that were posted on social media, it's clear the patch of the eclipse saw the moon crossing the sun on an angle from the bottom right to the top left. I am not versed in astronomy well enough to know for certain whose rotation was moving faster -- sun, moon or our planet. But apparently the path the sun travels in the solar system is called an ecliptic. I'm not sure if other spheres also travel in paths called an ecliptic.

I do know that I had been photographing this grand event from somewhere in the total-eclipse path stretching from Mazatlan, Mexico, in the southwest to Maine and Canadian New Brunswick in the northeast. If I were still in Indianapolis, I would have enjoyed full totality, although to enjoy it there for the longest period, I would have wanted to travel south to Franklin or Bloomington or southeast to Fairland in Shelby County, where the eclipse paths would have been almost dead-on center.   

But I'm not complaining. I'm happy I got what I did, as shown in the images in this post. After cropping, most of my images were right around 1 megabyte in size (some larger, some slightly lower). That's not too shappy. I could have cropped even more, but I didn't want to drop too far below 1MB per image. 

I shot all these from the backyard of my home. At the midway point, the spheres' ecliptic paths started to get behind trees in the neighbor's yard, so I found myself moving the tripod to a new place without obstruction with almost every new shot after 3 p.m. Nevertheless, the tree limb obstruction did give me the idea to make a few photos with the limbs and leaves superimposed on the sun, so I include those here for your entertainment.

I begin, with the lead-off photo at the top, with the eclipse at its most extreme point, which in Raleigh resulted with what appears to be a perfect crescent shape. This occurred at 3:08 p.m. The others are presented in chronological order, beginning with the full sun (1:48 p.m.) moments before the moon took its first bite out of the sun. 

2:05 p.m.

2:09 p.m.

2:13 p.m.

2:18 p.m.

2:19 p.m.

2:25 p.m.

2:30 p.m.

2:37 p.m.

2:44 p.m.

2:58 p.m.

3:01 p.m. 

(Note: the one below is also from 3:01, but with a vertical orientation)

3:08 p.m.

This was at the point of maximum coverage

3:25 p.m.

3:42 p.m.

3:51 p.m.

4:07 p.m.

4:23 p.m.

(final image before sun returned to full sphere)

Photo geek stuff: I shot the eclipse with a Canon 6D using Manual settings and the Large RAW image-size selection. The 6D was equipped with a Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5-6.3 Di VC PZD lens set to 300mm for all the photos, which meant the aperture was a constant 6.3 for the duration. I started with a shutter speed set at 1/350 and ISO of 250. (I settled on these settings after doing test shots of the full sun before the eclipse began.) I reduced the shutter to 1/125 and boosted ISO to 500 during the crescent portion of the eclipse because the diminished sphere size and light was preventing the camera from finding focus with the start-up settings. As the sun returned to normal shape, I was able to return the shutter and ISO to settings close to what I had started with. Also for the duration, the Tamron lens was covered with a certified, eclipse-safe filter, which I had taped to the lens barrel. In post-processing, the sizes of the RAW images were all uniform: 18.2MB. Usually, my 6D's RAW images in Large image-size mode are closer to 28.6MB. These were undoubtedly significantly smaller because there was so little readable information in each photo; most of each image's frame was black/vacant. Hence, by the time I'd cropped the photos to the sizes I settled upon, the resultant JPEGs were right around 1MG each (most of the time, the sizes of my JPEGs after processing range from 8 to 12MB, depending on cropping). I did not have to do much else with the photos in post-processing except to sharpen. Afterwards, I certainly wished I had tried to rent a lens with a longer focal range for the eclipse shoot; I'd have had to have done a lot less cropping. And speaking of cropping, as you can see, when cropped my photos, I chose to place the sun on the left side of horizontal-oriented images because the moon's "bite" was coming from the bottom right, and I wanted the bite side to be near the larger space in the final image. 

The full-size versions of my images of the solar eclipse can be found at my SmugMug galleries by following the link in this sentence.