Our trip to Maine March 29, 2025
It’s official my wife and I are now eclipse hunters. Ever since the total solar eclipse last April 8th, we have been hooked on these very unique and somewhat frequent astronomical events. Though the eclipse we viewed and captured today in Preque Isle Maine was a partial one, it was totally worth the effort of flying from Miami to Maine.
Originally we were hoping to capture the event from our base in beautiful Bar Harbor, but my Astrospheric weather app indicated 100% cloud cover at sunrise March 29th. Ana and I spent time scoping out suitable sites including the entrance of Cadillac Mountain at Acadia National Park and on the shoreline facing East in front of the Bar Harbor Inn hotel. We even woke at 5 am to have a couple practice runs from both sites on Thursday and Friday. See picture below.
Go Time: In the afternoon of March 28th, we made the decision to drive 3.5 hours from Bar Harbor north to Presque Isle. Roughly 125 miles of driving from 1:30 am to 5 am. It was a long drive along dark roads and highways. We came upon several sections of I-95 with warning signs of “Deer and Moose crossings: High Hit Area”. So the warning that an 800 pound Moose could suddenly appear in the middle of the highway, really kept me focused on the road. Luckily, we only saw one Coyote just as we were leaving Bar Harbor.
5:15 am we arrive at our destination. Presque Isle Maine where potato farming is big business! I asked the attendant at the Circle K where we could find a clear view to the East for the eclipse and she suggested we drive down a road right before the mall and keep going for a few miles. We did just that and came upon the parking lot of a closed medical center where we decided to set up our cameras and Seestar. Did I mention if was 17 degrees?! We had to keep running back into the car every few minutes to regain feeling in our hands and feet. It was that cold. I now know why snow birds flock to Miami.
5:50 am: We set up the Canon R50 on a tripod, Ana’s iPhone 15 and the Seestar S50 pointed at a large hill to the east. It was so cold that the masking tape we got to hold the solar filters on the camera and iPhone would not stick to the camera or phone. I’m just grateful we did not have a strong wind.
6:18 am: The first light of the sun breaks over the hill and we are frantically imaging from the Cannon, iPhone and the Seestar. I actually started with a video from the Seestar to try and get the double sunrise aka the Devils Horns, but since our view was delayed by 2 minutes because of the hill, we missed it. Only people that were standing on the ocean shore facing East were able to capture the double sunrise.
The moment of truth. After the Seestar locked onto the Sun, I put it in a 2 second time lapse interval and was able to capture these two videos. It would have been and should have been one longer continuous video had I not taken the Seestar back to the car with me. This caused the Seestar to stop imaging when it lost contact with my iPhone. Arrrgg!!! I ran back and restarted the time lapse for the second half.
In total the partial solar eclipse lasted just over 40 minutes. And yes, we would do it all over again, even for this partial event. I could not understand why there was so little interest. Maybe because it was only a partial and not a total.
I would like to thank Mr. David Clark, retired astronomy professor at the University of Maine for his advice and guidance via the phone.
Carlos Garcia,
StarPicturesMiami.com
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