Totalitarianism

August 21st. Madras, Oregon. After a trip across the country, we were ready for the main reason for travelling to the US. The total solar eclipse. My 9th eclipse, and hopefully, the 8th I would actually see. The roads had been packed, and there was a few forest fires around the area. The smoke from these fires were threatening to throw a dark carpet across the skies.
Luckily, the skies where almost clear. There was a thin veil of clouds and smoke across the skies, but nothing that would hamper the view of the solar eclipse. All I had to do, was to increase the ISO of my camera to compensate for the slight decrease in light throughput.
On previous eclipses, I have done all of the exposure settings manually. Not only stressing during totality, but also error-prone and also leaving me with precious little time to enjoy the actual sight. So this time, for the first time, I decided to create an automatic system to control the camera. Since I am using Pentax, there is little or no software available. All available software supports Nikon and/or Canon. But I did find some open source program supporting Pentax. So I just modified that to handle a script I made. This way, I would get a series of exposures before totality and a series of different exposures of the corona during totality.

The following are some of the images taken, and a couple of animations of the eclipse. Both before and during totality.

A combo of 8 images from 1/4000th to 1/2 second

 

Here is a video made from the exposures before totality. The camera program took 3 images per minute at 1/4000th of a second.

And here is one video of the totality itself.