BAJA

This eclipse was quite special due to its long duration, 2 very large prominences, and large solar corona. The longest duration in Baja was projected to be 6m 52s, but we stayed at the complex of the El Presidente Hotel (as of 2017 it became the Holiday Inn Resort, Los Cabos) in San Jose del Cabo where we had 6m 20s of totality. This turned out to be the better of the options as those that went to the centerline got clouded out half way through totality, we noticed a slight amount of light haze forming, but we had clear skies throughout.

My friend Jim and I went here with Scientific Expeditions - The S&T tour) and our flights were scheduled through different airlines on the way down (the same on the way back), and we met up with our friend Steve who was touring with Travelbug International)

I took twin mounted Bausch & Lomb 4-inch cats mounted side by side on a C8 fork mount (not quite perfectly aligned). Jim took a telephoto lens and a miniature video camera and monitor mounted on a small clock driven mount. Since Jim feared that somebody would pull the breakers at the hotel if the lights came on during totality, he modified the tracker so he could track manually as he gently turned a knob attached to the main drive gear. Steve took a 300mm telephoto. I also set up a video camera that imaged what we did during the eclipse.

One camera was a Nikon F with a 250 exposure back where I had Ektachrome 100 Slide film, and the other was a Minolta with a 100 exposure back where I used Ektar 25 color negative film. In order for me to develop the color negative (Ektar) file I had to cut it into 3 strips and load it into 36 exposure cassettes, so I had to take a chance on cutting an exposure or two in half.

I also set up a simple panoramic camera on a lazy susan and took 2 complete sets of our surroundings, one set several minutes before totality, and the other set during totality.

We had a great time and got a lot of great images and a fantastic video.

I am just now starting to scan these images so I can have them all digitized (2017.02.16). These were all scanned but I did not get a chance to start aligning them and adding them to this database/ I just completed doing this with the Ektachrome images and will be adding these to this gallery (2020.04.25)

My roomie for this trip was Kim Leasure. We were supposed to travel together but the travel group booked totally different flights for us. We were traveling with the Sky and telescope trip, our friend Steve Sherrod traveled with TravelBug but we were at the same hotel. David Lynch and Laurie Breman traveled together and stayed in Cabo San Lucas, we took a cab there one day and all met up there and did some shopping together. Their travel group included Patrick Stewart and LaVar Burton. They also went directly to the centerline, which they said clouded up half way through totality.