Total Solar Eclipse at Huntington, OR : August 19-22, 2017
Saturday, August 19 : Madras Recon
My plan was to fly into Pendleton, OR on Saturday and decide whether to fly into Madras on Sunday or drive down I-84 towards totality near Idaho. Smoke from wildfires seemed to blanket Northern California up to Central Oregon, but it cleared up just north of Bend.
Sunday, August 20 : Huntington High School
Although some friends who flew into Madras said conditions were fine, I was still concerned about the smoke in the area and a lack of mobility once on the ground there, so I hit the road and wound up in the town of Huntington, Oregon, population 440. I camped out on the football field at Huntington High School.
Monday, August 21 : 44°17'39"N 117°14'17"W
The high school was in a bowl that limited visibility of the horizon, and I thought the few street lights in town might prove annoying, so I relocated a short way south along the highway for the eclipse.
Eclipse sequence
As for the eclipse... Wow. I'd read about the various effects as totality approached - the cooling of the air, the shimmering of the shadow bands on the ground, the diamond ring just prior to totality. It was quite something to see and feel all of that happening, mostly in the few minutes just before totality. And totality itself: the sky remained a little brighter than I expected - a dark deep blue, the greyish white of the corona, and then a dark black hole in the sky where the sun should be. Simply incredible! Neither words nor pictures do justice to the spectacle. The area sat in eerie twilight for the predicted couple of minutes, and then the diamond ring appeared again and light returned to the land.An animated gif of the eclipse sequence
All times in UTC.
Wide angle sequence
Frame grabs from a video. The camera was set to a fixed exposure so it didn't try to adjust for the increasing darkness. It gives a sense of the dynamic range of an eclipse... or the lack of dynamic range of a camera. It didn't actually look pitch dark to the eye, but it got pretty dim. I was told the streetlights in town came on before it even got to totality.An animated gif of the sequence
Tuesday, August 22 : Heading home
I never sleep well in a tent, and having a train yard operating through the night while anticipating a solar eclipse didn't help. I spent the night in Pendleton and headed home the next day. I took a detour to overfly Huntington, and got to dodge some thunderstorms in the Nevada desert.
