Still crazy after all these years

The wife and I really wanted to see the eclipse, and we had planned to drive north about 45 min to get on the
path of max duration totality.....until the weather reports showed it was going to be clouding and stormy.
So, we decided to drive up to Nebraska..... (from near KC area). Then, it started to look like only the
panhandle of Nebraska was going to be clear. So we planned to drive to Alliance, I have been
there before. Then Alliance looked like it was going to have clouds in the time frame, so we switched to
eastern Wyoming, been to Douglas before, too. Finally Sunday AM we headed out and spent the night
in a Loaf 'n Jug in Douglas, then drove for 20 min SW on two lane black top to get a great spot.

It all worked out, traffic was fine all the way up, but hideous on I-25, so we headed east on 2 lane, still lost
an hour near Lusk, but after that no probs.

Here are a couple of small versions of a few of the hundreds of pix, time lapse, video and more that I took.
We could see planets while we were in totality. Mercury is visible in one of the totality pix.

Great time, nice pix. Retirement is fun.



Nailed the "diamond ring" phase.



Mercury is visible in this shot. Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter were clearly visible during totality. Amazing.



Bill

That last pic is what it looked like to the naked eye at totality. Truly amazing, and really hard to photograph with
any foreground and get the corona properly exposed, too.

Bill

I have become a last resort the past cpl years as babysitter for one Gbaby before she starts the school year.I'd rather be cutting firewood......it's easier,haha.

But in any case,wifey had snagged us proper glasses,although the discussion of welding helmet lense intensity did come up with the young'n.

We were timing our trips out onto the side porch at about 15-20 minute intervals,also keeping an eye on cloud cover.Whilst watching violent old classic cartoons on utube.We'd go lean up against the Chippendale rails,cause of the welding glass,err eclipse glasses,laughing...but not wanting to fall off the porch.

Foghorn Leghorn,Daffy Duck,Old Bugs Bunny and a solar eclipse.We saw it allllmost completely blocked out.Thin line of bright right at the top that didn't get covered.

Wife went to Hopkinsville KY with a group of locals on a bus trip sponsored by the Evansville Museum. She's a docent so got to go for free. No problem getting there, took 6-1/2 hours to get back from what is normally a 2-1/2 hr drive. Lot of folks going home after watching eclipse, typical summer road construction, etc. She was pumped about what she saw.

I watched eclipse in back yard with apprentice, not total here in Evansville IN but it got dark and cooled off a little. Awe inspiring!

those thin edges of light during totality is the sun peeking through the asteroid pock marks.
they are called beads and are named after someone that first noticed them [but I forget his name]
I went up to the end of the lake yesterday and threw out some lines in the water.
it was right on the edge of 100% and 99.9 percent but it was as far as the lake went and I wanted to observe the birds and such in that area.
[any further and I would have been observing high desert nothingness]
the dirt road had about zero traffic, we had no neighbors to talk to [except a few cows] and I could observe the birds and fish in relative quiet.
I had Littlegirl with me and she got a couple of good pictures through my auto-darkening welding helmet. she got a real good one of the corona, and she almost caught the diamond ring but was fidgeting around trying to flip her phone around and use it backwards so ended up with a pic of the smile right at the bottom instead.
the most interesting part was watching the birds go to roost, and how the fish behaved.
it sent some of them into hyperactive overdrive and some [trout] it shut down sending them down into the deeper parts of the lake and inducing lock-jaw.
as soon as the totality was over we took off from there and shot down through the mountains to another lake getting there right before the end of the event but in plenty of time to observe the actions of the animals in that area.
I got to a spot I know well on this reservoir and was amazed at the amount of minnows up in the shallows.
I was also impressed when the whitefish started coming through and aggressively attacking them.
I been fishing this lake pretty steadily for quite some time and never knew there was even whitefish in it let alone in the numbers I seen.
[I caught one to confirm that is what they were]

Bill: you should have just went up on Casper mountain, it would have saved you some time and effort.

I sat in my garage, and cast for 45 colt. When it got a little dim, I went out
and watched what was probably a 3/4 or a bit more of the eclipse. Interesting,
but not a big thing in my life.

Paul

Great photos, Bill, not the easiest to achieve without all manner of lens flares. I must have got over being crazy, your photos are more exciting than the real thing I glanced at once yesterday through a shade #11.

Old retired folks need something to keep them interested....that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Traffic on I-25 from Douglas to was horrible. 20 mph, stop and go. Did 10 miles to the next exit (literally no
roads that connected even remotely directly other than the interstate) and then went east. With the
exception of Lusk, where the cops "directing traffic" seemed to be doing nothing or making it worse,
no probs after that.

Fiver, we wondered what the horses would do. They saw people on their fence line, probably never saw
that before, and came across the pasture (3/4 mile) to see what we were doing and get some scratching.

Bill

Ian,
I have been through several partial eclipses, interesting but not too big a deal, really.

Totality is an entirely different thing. No eye protection, that blazing white corona surrounding the
stark black disk, with planets out and the temperature dropped, and dim twilight...... very interesting.
The corona appeared to the naked eye to be wider than shown on photos, sky black and planets and
stars. A truly black and white scene. Nothing at all like the minor "hmm, that's interesting" kind of
thought process for a partial eclipse. I wasn't really ready for how dramatic it is.

The normal sun seems clearly yellow to me, but the corona is a true white, not sure why that is.

Bill

The shot with Mercury in it was pretty cool, would have loved to have seen that in person. The eclipse was only about 60% here, not too exciting. Saw a near total when I was a kid, that was pretty neat, sky got dim but not enough to see stars.

The most incredible things I've ever seen in the sky both involved the space shuttle. Re-entry directly overhead at about 0400 hours from central Texas vantage point during a hunting trip, and a mysterious green gas ring twice the size of a full moon at about midnight. The re-entry, not knowing what it was at the time, was freakish: Imagine a streak of fire as wide as your hand at arm's length going from horizon to horizon in under five minutes, inky black to the west and a point of white to the east with every shade of yellow and orange between. After Columbia burned up they changed the re-entry trajectory so it would pass over the narrow part of Mexico and fewer chunks of flaming debris would hit houses if it happened again. The green gas ring was reported on the AM radio the next morning as some experiment or other, pretty vague. The ISS is pretty neat to hunt in the sky, too, but for me only because I have had my own two (gloved) hands on just about every square inch of Node 1 and some of the parts stamped with the last four digits of my SSN are still keeping people alive up there.

We had 99% totality here in my part of Oregon. I can't believe the number of people who came here to watch it. It was rather amazing.

the corona is hotter than the surface of the sun.
it's hot enough to strip molecules from iron [I'm not 100% but airc it's something like 18-19 of the 23 that are stripped away]
years back they thought it was a new element and called it coriolium,or coronium.
[yeah more useless information I keep tucked away and forget until it just pops up for some odd reason]

to get a real good picture of the corona you have to use different exposures then overlay all the pictures into one final Pic.
you can then see it radiate out, and see the striation lines caused by the magnetic field.

Bill:
I wish I'd have known you were gonna be near Casper it's only 6 hrs away and I know most of the back roads around there. [enough I can get from there to here without driving the Interstate, and miss most major highways if I'm in the pickup]
it would have been fairly easy to find a quiet place so you could set your stuff up and work it in peace and quiet.

I bet the pull-off on the south side of Casper Mountain near the top was packed yesterday.

possibly but I bet the canyon to the east wasn't too bad.

Didn't get all the way to Casper. We pulled off at Douglas and spent the night, drove out 91 to the
SSW the AM of the eclipse about 12-15 miles put us right on max totality for that longitude. Higher
in the mountains would have been more scenic, but I expect that the view of totality would have
been pretty much the same. The beads are called "Bailey's Beads", IIRC, fiver. I know I
could have taken 91 south and avoided the jam, but we wanted to get east, and no
way to do that that I could see other than going down to the Lusk road on I-25. Where we
wound up, the nearest folks were 25 yds away, next about 120 yds the other way. Not
crowded.

That high temp fits in why the corona is so white, when the normal sun is definitely more
yellow - higher temps.

I have spent pretty much every Sept since 1973 in Wind River range and Yellowstone, so I know
that part really well, most backroads around Pinedale and north, but less so around Casper and on the east
side of the Winds, only a couple of trips there, but 35 or so between Green River Lakes and
Big Sandy opening, most many times.

Ian - was that a normal reentry and landing light show or was that the one that burned up? Sounds
truly amazing, hope it wasn't the crash. I have a friend that was on board the space station for 6 months, did
some space walks. He is a fellow Long EZ builder and we have flown formation together. He brought an
amazing stack of 8x10s that he took from SS to a Rutan homebuilt fly-in a few years back and we spent a couple
of hours going over them. It was really amazing. He could pick up any 8x10 and after I had guessed where it was
taken, getting a fair number correct, he would tell me in great detail where it was. Talk about getting
a geography lesson! He was a REAL expert on this planet after that assignment.

How did you wind up working on the SS?

Bill

yes,,,,, Baily's Beads sounds right.
amazing what a little thinking and some observation will get your name on.

Boeing Defense and Space was my first gig after college, in the right place at the right time to do some production work on a few of the "special" projects that came through the new ISO-9000 shop at the Corinth plant, that was one of many. Atlas II rocket stuff, F-22, that sort of thing, I built and QC'd electrical parts for all of them. Did some work in Atlanta also on the ISS, kind of followed it around, even to the Cape as part of the small entourage enlisted with the duty of protecting OUR work from everyone else. This ISS was a glory and a nightmare at the same time, too much politics and not enough science in my mind, like most NASA entanglements. Throw in the aerospace union shenanigans and it's a real mess, but hey, we all got nice ball caps presented to us when Unity was put in orbit, still have mine somewhere, now I sort of regret having worn it for oil changes and stuff. All a good dose of reality which helped temper my youthful ambitions with a good dose of reality before it was too late to make an easy and sharp change of education/career tack.

The re-entry I witnessed was a normal one, when Columbia came apart it was just after sun-up and was in small bits by the time it made it to my location and fortunately, I wasn't witness to it as I was to the STS-51L. One of the project engineers for the thermal tile system (he developed the adhesive, IIRC) was an occasional customer of ours at a small automotive shop here in my home town, heard from his wife he got called out of retirement for the investigation, cradle to grave stuff a lot of us are a part of like it or not.

Sounds interesting, Ian. Cool to have parts you built in space. I have a photo of my EZ that has flown to the ISS and got stamped
and returned. I wish I had a chance to witness that reentry. I did see several Saturn V launches, one at night and one night SS launch, too. Amazing devices.

I was talking to my astronaut friend and a NASA project manager friend of his that I know, and they were present when the
testing films of the impact test of a chuck of 2 lb/cu ft urethane foam was fired into a carbon fiber leading edge sample from
the SS. Everyone expected the ultra strong, thick carbon fiber LE to just disintegrate the chunk of foam......they reported a
loud gasp from the audience of SS engineers, scientists and project manager when the lightweight foam punched straight thru
the CF leading edge. And the hot plasma blew in, melted the aluminum LE spar, and then entered the wing
main structure and started melting that. Really grim and totally unexpected result. V squared term.......I learned long ago
to examine the exponents of a controlling equation. Be very aware of second order term, make you a hero or wipe you out,
depending on which way they go. Third order terms are to be REALLY wary of, can really help or hurt. Only one fourth order
term that I know of in all of physics.

Nobody imagined a piece of foam could do that.

Bill

I had dinner with David Griggs ...........
Watched them piggyback 2 of the shuttles from up on the hill at Edwards .

David signed my Dad's log book off for North American AT6 . Dad flew from Fallon to Reno/Stead for the Air races with David in the back seat .

Glory days .......

Astronauts are interesting people, smart, hard chargers and capable. So interesting to get to visit with
someone who has spent time in space, amazing stories of things I will never get to do. I have managed to
do many things, but that will almost certainly not be on my list of accomplishments.

Bill