April 2024

Eclipse Adventure

Ramen Junkie April 9, 2024 0Comment

In 2017, I took a trek with my parents down to Carbondale Illinois to view the total solar eclipse. While these are reasonably common occurrences, they are not super common in an area where it’s easy to go see them. At this point, I’ve been fortunate to have two of them come nearby within a few years. We had vague plans to go back to Carbondale again for the 2024 eclipse but instead opted to go to my aunt and uncle’s place in Indiana. With one big benefit being that it meant avoiding excessively pricey hotels. Last Eclipse, we stayed in my parent’s camper, but they don’t have the camper anymore so that wasn’t an option this round. It also meant it was much easier to stay an extra night and avoid the stress of the traffic leaving the area.

Aside from visiting my relative’s new house for the first time, my main draw is trying to take photos of the event. It’s also just, neat to be here. My pics from last Eclipse came out pretty well, and I wanted to give it another go. I also tried a little experiment this time using my laptop and a spare webcam I had to try to take a video of the while thing. This… sort of worked out, but it’s not exactly amazing footage. It was still a fun experiment though.

The actual eclipse photos themselves came out alright, though I am not sure why they have such a blue tint to them. It looks pretty cool though. I tried a variety of F-stop and shutter speeds to try to get some of the different layers based on some reading online but they all kind of just came out pretty similar. For these photos, I used my Pentax K-3 DSLR and a 300mm telephoto lens.

I really should look into a better lense at some point, this one is quite old I had a bit of trouble with it zooming out on it’s own while pointed upwards because the weight would cause it to collapse back into itself. I “fixed” it with a spot of tape on the barrel, but it’s been a bit of an issue off and on for a while. For a filter I reused the one I had from 2017. I’d kept it in good shape stored in a small plastic box.

I’ve also posted a full gallery here.

Ramen Junkie

Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”.  I write about my various hobbies here.  Mostly coding, photography, and music.  Sometimes I just write about life in general.  I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.

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