Got down to the NELHA access road with plenty of time to set-up for the partial eclipse at 5:14 p.m. But the gods were not totally in my favor. The wind was blowing south to north, it was blowing the opposite yesterday, so planes would be taking-off and not landing through the eclipse area. Sure I could have driven north of the airport but that would have meant running around a lava field to get into position, plus with my camera gear someone might think I’m some kind of nut aiming at the airplanes.
So I took some practice shots again before the eclipse, here’s an F-18 Hornet taking off from Kona International Airport.
Here’s an Aloha Airlines 737 after taking off and heading to Honolulu, notice how the plane veers west pretty quickly so it doesn’t get to close to the sun at my angle.
Note: I’m going to embargo my eclipse photos until tomorrow since I gave some to the newspaper. I want to let them publish them first in Thursday’s paper, then I’ll post images here.
I did get some nice partial solar eclipse photos which I’ll post tomorrow (see note above). But none with airplanes in them, nobody took-off during the partial eclipse while I was there. Also thick clouds prevented me from seeing the climax of the eclipse as the sun dropped behind the clouds at about 5:45 p.m. which is quite a bit before when it would have sunk into the ocean. So while the clouds and lack of planes turned out to be a lemon I did make some tasty lemonade in the way of photos, you’ll just have to wait a day.