Stories from my trip to Puerto Vallarta to see the eclipse...
I second/third the notion of not spending the time and effort to try and photograph the eclipse. Here is a photo I took in Mexico for the 1992 totality using a Nikon FE film DSLR with a medium focal length lens. I was so wowed by the eclipse that I was able to squeeze off only this one picture. The event is too short and the various stages so distracting that it is better to just observe it naked eye during totality and then with solar glasses and solar film on your binoculars for the stages or partiality before and after, in my opinion
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Here is the picture full size with the book I carried for reference which I still recommend for learning about the history of eclipse watching and the physics and phenomena.
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Unusually and fortuitously the apparent diameter of the moon and the sun are very close from earth. The phenomenon pictured in my photo and the one on the cover are the fuzzy fringe of the sun's chromosphere revealed due to the occulting nature of the moon's body. This fringe of light is the chromosphere that is normally invisible even when viewing the sun through a solar filter. You don't get to see this region during an annular eclipse because the photosphere, the bright white center surface of the sun we normally see is too bright and overpowering. It was early expeditions to see eclipses centuries ago where scientists started understanding the anatomy of our star. Now, modern astronomers and photographers use specialized optics with occulting disks to cover the white photosphere to observe this chromosphere. The red loops and streaks in the larger photo are called prominences which originate in the chromosphere. More on that later and in the book. Then there are the corona. More on that later too. And Bailey's beads, and the wedding ring effect, and the wall of shadow overtaking you. More on that later or in the book too. We were thunderstruck by nearly all of that.
The picture on the right is basically the naked eye view. You can view this without any eye filters because it is not that bright. This view can be greatly enhanced with careful observation through binoculars and we did. We quickly too our filters off the binoculars and made sure to quit viewing before the sun came out from behind the moon. The darkness of the sky varies from eclipse to eclipse and in our viewing it was twilight-level sky color. The picture was exposed like this by the lab probably trying to bring out detail in that little light object in the center called Sol occulted by la bella Luna.