Monday April 8th 2024. Just outside Cleveland Ohio.
After seeing the total solar eclipse over North America in 2024 I was determined to to see the next one. I drove from outside DC to Cleveland the previous day and scouted the area for a nice place to set up the next day. I didn’t really have much of a plan. I drove around Cleveland looking for someplace in the city that might work. I didn’t find anything promising but I did visit a nice little neighborhood that had some quirky little shops restaurants. Most of them were closed but I did stop in a place called Ninja City
After getting some wings and a nice ice cream sandwich at a shop nearby I checked the map of maximum totality and started driving west along Lake Erie. In a town called Avon Lake I saw that the center of the totality passed right over a park that was right on the water of Lake Erie. It seemed like a nice picturesque place to take pictures of the eclipse. It was after dark so I decided to find a place to park my car in the Walmart parking lot nearby and try to get some sleep. I woke up before dawn and drove back to the park paid $40 to park at a church parking lot across the street and began to set up.
This was pretty early and only one or two people were there as well so I had my pick of spots. As it got closer to noon the park slowly began to fill up with eclipse watchers as well as the news media. I was actually interviewed by the BBC at one point since I was one of the few people there who had equipment set up. (I think the dinosaur jacket helped too)
You can see I have my little Meade telescope and a set of binoculars set up. I attached my Canon Rebel T7 camera to the Meade eyepiece with an adapter. I used a neutral density filter on the Meade. The binoculars are for projecting an image of the sun onto the ground or a piece of paper. My old telescope doesn’t have electronic tracking or a motorized mount so I had to set everything up manually and track the sun by turning knobs. Well… I turned a knob too far at one point and something on the telescope mounts snapped. Luckily, I had brought a lot of gorilla tape with me.
Finally it was time for the eclipse to begin so I changed into my special eclipse outfit.
I took over 700 pictures of the eclipse and I’m still deciding how I want to edit and adjust them but here’s the totality:
