I have such mixed feelings about all the time I spent with my cameras during the event. By time I realized I had no practice with the camera and eq mount for daytime use, it was cloudy the whole time at home. Totality is not something you can reasonably practice anyway. So yeah, I have a few cool totality pictures with varying detail and a couple hundred showing the partial phases… But for what? They’re not as good as many other amateurs, let alone professionals. If there was ever a time to deal with the hassle of raw photos, it was then. Part of why I gave up on most astrophotography is because the best I could possibly do is simply match it to scientific equipment. It’s cool to do it, but there’s no personalization. Instead, I look more for nightscapes or wide angle really detailed starfields. I’m still conflicted as to whether or not I experienced it properly. I got to show the pics to some people passing by after, assuming I was the go-to person for info on what they experienced, something I love about night time astronomy, but those aren’t such time-limited events.
I’ll probably revel in memories whenever I actually flip through the pictures. But, personally, I don’t think it was worth spending so much of my time getting pictures of a black hole in a black background rather than just letting my mark 1 eyeballs observe the hole in the blue-fade skies.
However, the one piece I absolutely would bring every single time again is binoculars. Maybe that’s why I feel like I didn’t see the eclipse. The view in my 10x binos was so incredibly detailed, the memory matches the stacked and tweaked pictures. I could see more than just the big laser-don’t flare on the bottom, I saw at least 3. Just unreal, no sight in my life before could explain it. A cartoonishly large corona with a black hole in a black background. Maybe I just couldn’t comprehend.
The light effects near totality were certainly something to experience. Decades of experience being in sunlight just didn’t jive with what the sun was doing then. It was more akin to a distant white streetlight rather than a sun. It dimmed and crisped shadows unlike a sunset by not turning orange and blurring of the edges.
I’m glad you had the emotional experience I was expecting to have.