Thunderf00t at the Great American Eclipse 2017! (Patreon)

There were a LOT of high stakes calculated gambles that went into making this video.  The biggest was 'should I go to Casper'.  The forecast was 'partially cloudy' 2 days before.... but I knew I had a good site.  Else I could go to idaho.... and it was a gamble for the site, but better chances of clear skies.   I put all my cards on Casper.  That first night there were 4 of us there on the Casper mountain siding.  By the time of the eclipse, there were hundreds!!... but I had my telescopes set up in a prime location! :-) As time went on the forecast improved... and the gamble looked good!  The clouds you see the day before are the ones that were initially forecast for eclipse day!!!  I had planned for the day before the eclipse to run a whole day timelapse of the Sun in the H-alpha.  However there were so many people there, who were clearly interested, I just let them all look.  Everyone who saw the solar flares in the H-Alpha loved them!... Theres something very vivid about seeing the flares coming out of the Sun with you naked eye thats just mind blowing....

On eclipse day, there was an asshole creationist there preaching at people (even during totality you can hear him say 'see i told you god did it').  I recorded bits of my interactions with him, but really I had my hands VERY full.  One full sky camera (which you can see keep gets getting nudged by all the people mulling around (even though it was tied to a crash barrier), video recording on the H-alpha telescope, one camera hopefully going to get the shadow coming in, one distant timelapse camera getting a wide shot with the ppl in the foreground, and one handheld camera on which I had to do everything manually (eclipses have a huge range of brightnesses on them).  You need the focus on manual too, else autofocus will struggle.  Sadly, while I had the focus set to infinite, during the eclipse it got nudged, so almost all my video of the actual eclipse is out of focus :-(

Thankfully I got several shots of the Earth shadow moving over the Earth at almost 2000 mph... so VERY happy with that..... also... it was gorgeous!  I hope you enjoy the video :-)