The plan came together the week before the eclipse when the weather models finally broke my way. A stubborn cloud deck had been threatening the Maritimes all week, but by Thursday evening the forecasts were converging on a clear window over northern Aroostook County, Maine — and my camp on Lac Unique in New Brunswick was just a short hop across the border. I loaded the car Friday night with the Astro-Tech AT72ED scope, the Nikon D7200 with its solar film filter, and enough layers to survive an Aroostook County April, crossed into the US at Fort Kent, and had the cabin on the lake open and the kettle on by 3:00 a.m. Saturday was spent rigging, polar-aligning, and running test sequences from the camp's clearing before turning in early with one eye still on the forecast.
On Monday morning I crossed back into Maine and drove south to the Francis Malcolm Science Center in Easton — a remarkable spot I'd had my eye on for months. The only organization of its kind in northern Maine, FMSC is home to the nation's northeastern-most planetarium theatre and an observatory with a retractable roof. I set up the Astro-Tech 72mm on the EQ6 on the club grounds atop an open hill, the surrounding potato fields stretching away in every direction under a flawless sky, with the club's observatory — housing a 20-inch Dobsonian under a 24-foot roll-top roof — standing watch not far behind me. The elevated, open position gave an essentially unobstructed horizon, and I had the solar filter locked on with twenty minutes to spare before first contact.
Totality arrived at 3:27 p.m. and lasted just under three minutes. I executed the filter swap, ran the bracketed coronal HDR sequence, and abandoned the camera for about forty seconds to simply look. The corona bloomed out symmetrically in the darkened sky, Venus punched through to the west; birds and insects alike went silent.
I drove back to Lac Unique that evening with clean coronal frames on the card and the particular, bone-deep satisfaction of a plan that actually worked.
-Claude/KD2MYS
