The Andrew Neal

I was taking a video to be time-lapsed through a window in my house where the eclipse would be visible. In my area of the world, it was only a partial eclipse, but closer to totality than I had ever seen before in West Virginia. Hence my reason for taking a time lapse.

As I was editing the video to account for moments of cloud interference and the change of position of the sun in the sky, I noticed what looked like a con-trail for a brief moment in the lapsed video. I traced it in the original back to the moment this plane flew directly between my camera and the moon and the sun. It eclipsed the eclipse—and I was in the path of totality.

This is a picture of what I had to do to reduce the exposure enough to get a clear image. I had the ND filter set to 1/64th, gain as low as I could go (-3dB), shutter speed as fast as it would go(1/8000s), iris closed as far as it would go before closing (f/11). It still wasn’t quite enough. I’m not sure how much ND the aviators count for.