Our "Eclipse Party"

As I noted in a blog post on Monday, I had serious concerns about my camera equipment and my ability to get the photos I wanted during our 90% eclipse.

I had resigned myself to trying to use my Nikon D3200, which doesn't have a movable monitor. This meant that in order to see the eclipse through the monitor and line things up, I was going to have to turn myself into a pretzel or something, since I needed to use a tripod and the self-timer on the camera.

Inspiration hit when I went to the bathroom. No, not that kind of inspiration! I figured out a way to put the solar film over my Nikon Coolpix P500, which is a point and shoot and truly my favorite camera.

 



I placed the solar film over the toilet paper tube, cut the tub in a few places so it would slide over the extension/zoom on my camera, and viola! I could now use the camera with the moveable monitor and the one with the best zoom on it. All I had to do was take the solar film on and off.

This worked well, as you can see from the photos.

With that all set, and my glasses available (including some that Amazon supposedly recalled and said they would refund me for, but no money has yet fallen into my account), my husband and I, along with my mother-in-law, settled in to watch the totality on TV and the eclipse from our area.

My goofy husband models his eclipse glasses.

We went old school, too, and made viewers out of cereal boxes.

My mother-in-law with her ball cap and dark sunglasses.

During the 90% part, it was this dark. The world seemed more like a burnt orange color, which unfortunately did not show up in the photo. But it did grow rather dark. The rooster down the street crowed the entire time the eclipse was going on.

My husband takes a gander at the sun through his special specs.

My mother-in-law looking through her special specs.

It was fun to take the afternoon off and enjoy a Mother Nature show. For me, the best thing was that for a few minutes there, we were once again a united people, with a lot of us, anyway, enjoying a spectacle that didn't involve death or destruction and nothing but warnings to not look at the sun (which you shouldn't do anyhow). See, we can come together and overcome our differences. We just have to do it in the 2 minutes of darkness during a total eclipse.