[QUOTE=Uncwilly;398255]From: [url]http://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/march-20-2015/[/url]

Looks like Paul was out in the [STRIKE]hemor[/STRIKE] asteroid belt.[/QUOTE]Sounds about right. It was noticeably darker near maximum eclipse than before hand but nowhere near as dark as really thick clouds would make it.

The 99 eclipse, OTOH, was around 97% in Cambridge and very much darker than normal.

[QUOTE=xilman;398275]The 99 eclipse, OTOH, was around 97% in Cambridge and very much darker than normal.[/QUOTE]
I'll never forget that one. We travelled to Northern France to see the total eclipse. Unfortunately there was cloud cover during the couple of minutes of totality, as I believe there was in most of Western Europe, but the moment when everything suddenly went pitch dark (we had positioned ourselves in the countryside far from any civilisation) was still incredibly impressive. The light in the few minutes beforehand was very strange, as if we were sitting in a large cardboard box, and the moment when the eclipse became total felt like someone suddenly closing the lid of the box.

I was lucky to see the July 1981 99% total eclipse (via a large telescope, all the time for myself and one or two more people; the local astronomers' club left the city for the trip to the path of total 100km to south) and the 2012 annular (drove the whole family to Utah for that - the conditions for that one were perfect). And partial (without leaving San Diego), last October.

I've seen [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_11,_1999"]this one[/URL] from my balcony, and I have somewhere a photo almost the same as the photo in the link. It was good biz for Ro at that time, plenty of tourists, lots of propaganda ("don't look at the sun through the smoked glass, you will go blind, buy our $9.99 glasses", etc), we even [URL="http://en.numista.com/catalogue/pieces8992.html"]coined it[/URL]... hehe.

Best I could do on last night's eclipse, attempting to get some good foreground Giant Saguaro cactus and Palo Verde trees. This one is prior to totality; the reddish color was better once it was actually total.

Norm

[QUOTE=Spherical Cow;411509]Best I could do on last night's eclipse, attempting to get some good foreground Giant Saguaro cactus and Palo Verde trees. This one is prior to totality; the reddish color was better once it was actually total. [/QUOTE]

Nice.

Here in Silicon Valley, due to low clouds in the east, things were looking bleak for the first hour post-moonrise - I went out ~7:45, no joy, still some fog and low clouds over the bay, but cleared up enough in the next hour that I got a good look around 8:30, just after the fully illuminated lower limb crescent had started showing, as the moon started moving back out of earth's shadow. [Roughly like in your pic but flipped so the bright portion is at lower left.]

Due to ambient (urban lights) brightness the reddish color was barely evident when just looking up, but shielding my eyes from the surrounding streetlights as best I could helped a lot.

This is a few minutes into totality. Taken a few miles north of Boston.

Nice- looks like you had a good-sized telephoto lens? I was using a 75mm zoom, and needed a 10-second exposure. Plus I had to use a flash during the exposure to get the cactus to show up.

Norm

[QUOTE=Spherical Cow;411576]Nice- looks like you had a good-sized telephoto lens?[/QUOTE]

200mm max telephoto on a DSLR. I also had to crop the picture to satisfy mersenneforum pixel limit, providing some more "apparent" magnification. Exposure was 2 sec.

My shots are on [url]http://fivemack.livejournal.com/273195.html[/url] and mostly demonstrate that my lens is too long and my tripod too wobbly

[URL="http://imgur.com/gallery/Zm4JOKb"]Link[/URL]