April 2024 Total Eclipse - Are you shooting?

This thread is specifically to discuss the Total solar eclipse that is happening April 8th 2024. I definitely plan to travel to shoot the event. I did shoot the one in 2017 and was very happy with the results. I'm hoping I can do as well in April.
I have a friend who lives up on a hill in Kerrville, TX. I will be taking a small teardrop trailer behind my Kia Telluride and staying in my trailer at his house (He's going to have a bunch of family there too so all the beds are spoken for).

I will be shooting with the R5 and my Sigma 150-600 with a Firecrest eclipse filter (I like this filter because it doesn't add any artificial colors to the sun). I also plan to use my iOptron tracker, which is what I used to shoot the Annular eclipse in October 2023. This is the set up I'll be using for the total eclipse, except instead of the Sirui carbon fiber tripod in this picture, I'll be using my brand new Promediagear TR344LBL tripod, which is considerably more sturdy.



If you're planning to photograph the total eclipse, what are your plans? Do you need to travel? Have you made reservations? Camping? What gear will you be using?

I'm in Ottawa. Totality will be visible within a 1-hour drive south of me. My two concerns are 1) traffic and 2) clouds. I hate driving on congested roads and being stuck in traffic jams. According to weather records, there is something like a 60%+ chance that it will be overcast on April 8.

I was at the total eclipse in March 1971, at Perry, northern Florida. It was overcast. At totality, it dimmed as though a heavy cloud passed, that's all.

I have family in Indianapolis and they have invited me for the eclipse. The cloud outlook there is only slightly better than for us.

Doing the eclipse well takes a lot of preparation. Given the circumstances, I think I will delegate the photography to others.

Enjoy your eclipse. It won't be visible here in Europe. I just checked and the next total solar eclipse here in southern Germany will be on September 3rd, 2081. If I live to be 115, I will surely check it out....

Archibald said:

I'm in Ottawa. Totality will be visible within a 1-hour drive south of me. My two concerns are 1) traffic and 2) clouds. I hate driving on congested roads and being stuck in traffic jams. According to weather records, there is something like a 60%+ chance that it will be overcast on April 8.

I was at the total eclipse in March 1971, at Perry, northern Florida. It was overcast. At totality, it dimmed as though a heavy cloud passed, that's all.

I have family in Indianapolis and they have invited me for the eclipse. The cloud outlook there is only slightly better than for us.

Doing the eclipse well takes a lot of preparation. Given the circumstances, I think I will delegate the photography to others.

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When we went to shoot the eclipse in 2017, my sister, who lives in Cheyenne, WY had a family friend who owned a large ranch near Glenrock, WY. She was able to coordinate to allow us to camp out on the ranch and then photograph the eclipse the next morning. As it happened, the center of totality went right through the ranch so we had a perfect front row seat with no crowds of people around.

I remember for the trip up the day before the traffic really wasn't bad at all. That's probably because most of the people who were going to that area had already arrived days before. However, when we headed back to Cheyenne, it was wall to wall traffic and what should have been a 2-3 hour trip took over 8 hours. The highway was like a parking lot.

I'm planning on leaving home for Texas on Saturday, spending the night in the camper somewhere along the way, then leaving early Sunday morning to make it into Kerrville, TX where my friend lives. I'm anticipating the traffic will be very bad in this area since Kerrville is right in the center of the path of totality. But, as long as I get there sometime Sunday I'll be happy.

Bryan Conner said:

Enjoy your eclipse. It won't be visible here in Europe. I just checked and the next total solar eclipse here in southern Germany will be on September 3rd, 2081. If I live to be 115, I will surely check it out....

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I have had the thrill of seeing two total eclipses in my life time so far. This one in April will be my third. The first total eclipse we saw was when I was in the US Air Force and stationed in Great Falls, Montana. I did not try to photograph that one, but we only had to step outside to our yard to view it. That first one was on Feb 26th 1979, just a few months before I was reassigned to New Mexico. The second eclipse was the one on August 21st 2017. that one I did photograph from up in Wyoming and it was great fun! I'm really looking forward to photographing this third eclipse. For this one, I will be using an iOptron Star Guider Pro to track the sun so I won't have to worry about constantly re-aligning the sun in the view finder. I used that tracker when I photographed the annular eclipse last October and it worked flawlessly.

I'm going to head south to either southern Oklahoma, or North Texas to shoot the eclipse.

I have my R6mII and I just picked up an R7 to shoot. Will probably rent an RF100-500. But I'm thinking about that Sigma 150-600 also. Will probably use my RF70-200f/4 on the R7 to try to get some sort of sequential eclipse series with landscape. The sun's going to be pretty high in the sky, so not sure what I'll be able to get. But I'll try to get something.

Still trying to decide if I want to pick up a star tracker.

JCBigler said:

I'm going to head south to either southern Oklahoma, or North Texas to shoot the eclipse.

I have my R6mII and I just picked up an R7 to shoot. Will probably rent an RF100-500. But I'm thinking about that Sigma 150-600 also. Will probably use my RF70-200f/4 on the R7 to try to get some sort of sequential eclipse series with landscape. The sun's going to be pretty high in the sky, so not sure what I'll be able to get. But I'll try to get something.

Still trying to decide if I want to pick up a star tracker.

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I already own the Sigma 150-600 C, which I used for the 2017 eclipse, so that is what I'll be using for my main camera. When I shot the 2017 eclipse, I had the focal length set at 500mm, because I felt the images would be a little sharper if I didn't go all the way to 500 on that lens. This time I'm thinking of renting another camera and using my RF 24-105 with a Thousand Oaks filter to get a bit of the sequence across the sky. I won't be able to get any landscape because the sun will be very high in the sky from my location, but there is a stature of a lion on a pedestal nearby and I'm thinking of getting down low and shooting up at that statue with the sun arching across in phases. I won't get wide enough to get the entire eclipse from first contact to last, but will get a good portion of it. (I hope)

That said, if I didn't already own the Sigma, I would probably rent the RF100-500. As for star trackers, luckily I already have one which I used for the October annular eclipse and plan to use for this one. If you do get one, be sure to align it to you north the night before when Polaris is visible, then just leave it set up. That's what I did for the annular eclipse and it was great - the sun stayed right in the center the whole time and I didn't have to fiddle with recentering the sun every few minutes. If you do decide to get a tracker, but don't want to spend a lot of money (like my iOptron), I've heard good things about the Move-Shoot-Move trackers.

I'm praying for clear skies, but this predictive model has me worried about my planned location. Historically, south Texas is supposed to be relatively good for chances of clear skies, but this model is predicting high probability of cloudy conditions on April 8th. Ironically, the Northeast is supposed to be historically poor for cloud cover, but this model shows better conditions than much of the rest of the path. Here's a screen shot of the current (as of March 31) model. The area in Texts I'm planning on is northeast of San Antonio, in a light blue area. Note that light blue=heravy cloud cover and white is less cloud cover (I know it seems intuitively backwards). As I post this, we are still a week out and these models don't really get reliable until 2 or three days out, so there's still hope. I'll post a link to this model page below this screenshot for anyone wanting to track predictive cloud cover as the date draws closer.

Not shooting. There will be so many shots of this on the internet, I see no reason to shoot it. I will watch it from my house with my dogs.(it will be partial where I am in MD.) Just not an interesting thing to me.
I may photograph my dogs while the event is happening as the light changes. Will be interesting to see how the pups react. I suspect they will just ignore it.

RedCobra said:

Not shooting. There will be so many shots of this on the internet, I see no reason to shoot it. I will watch it from my house with my dogs.(it will be partial where I am in MD.) Just not an interesting thing to me.
I may photograph my dogs while the event is happening as the light changes. Will be interesting to see how the pups react. I suspect they will just ignore it.

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If it isn't of interest too you to photograph, then by all means just enjoy the show.

Man, I really hope that the cloud covers doesn't ruin this.

Although, a few clouds can look cool too, just not the whole sky.