Darlene and I drove the camper van out to Texas to try to see the total solar eclipse as it traced out a path across North America on April 8th.  Darlene’s friend and coworker Rhonda and her husband Jim have a home in the country in central Texas, northwest of Austin, which happened to lie near the center line of the path of totality.  They invited us as well as many other friends and neighbors to experience the eclipse together on their property.

The weather forecast was looking pretty grim a week before the big day – a multi-day storm for central Texas and heavy cloud cover for much of the entire path across the central states.  We made the long trip anyway in the hope of seeing something though.  It started looking more hopeful as we got closer.  On the morning of, the clouds were pretty heavy but patches of blue sky started to appear mid-morning, a few hours before the moon’s shadow was to reach us.  It never completely cleared but we were all excited and grateful to be able to see and enjoy the eclipse through the passing clouds – and even still see totality through the veil of clouds right up until the end of it.  The clouds did obscure much of the outward radiance of the corona during totality but it was still spectacular and we were able to clearly see several prominences extending beyond the edge of the moon – even with the naked eye!

I had set up a bunch of cameras and my two telescopes to capture the scene and share magnified views of the sun as it happened.  I had a few things go wrong though, including inadvertently moving my telephoto camera’s lens out of focus (ruining the wider view I wanted to capture) and discovering a series of tiny blotches across the images and video from my 8″ SCT telescope setup that I had to touch up afterwards.

I was still able to put together a short video of the experience:

Many thanks to Jim and Rhonda for their hospitality and inviting us to join them – and nice job guys on fixing the weather just in time!

Click through for the full gallery of pictures:

Here’s the galleries (and videos) from several previous solar eclipse experiences:
Eclipse from the Ruby Mountains (annular eclipse in Nevada on 10/14/2023)
A Total Eclipse of the Sun (total eclipse in Oregon on 8/21/2017)
Eclipse Watch (annular eclipse in California on 5/20/2012)