When I had first arrived, I asked the group next to me if they'd watch my tripods and defend the area should anyone encroach on ample working room while I was eating lunch. They were happy to oblige, and would not accept any food from the restaurant as payment. (They had brought their own provisions—more on them later.)

A couple filed in behind me. Both academics, the one with all the photography equipment informed me he was going to edit his photos in MATLAB. For the uninitiated, MATLAB is what engineers, mathematicians, and scientists use for data, graphings, and image processing. I am very interested to see what he comes up with as I had never thought to use that software. (We exchanged e-mails, so hopefully he'll let me post an update here, too!)

To my right, two high-schooler juniors set up some folding chairs to keep their third tripod-lugging high-school junior-friend company. While waiting for first contact, they began talking about the books they were reading for class: Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby, Things Fall Apart... all of which were on my high school English reading list over twenty years ago.

Surreal, because it also reminded me that the last time I attempted to take a photo of the sun, it was with a manual-focus SLR in high school.

The sun's rays, when focused through a 50mm lens and bouncing around a prism, are unperturbed by the modicum of protection offered by a normal pair of polarized sunglasses. I felt the error before it caused any permanent damage.

n.b. Do not look directly at the sun with the naked eye... and especially not underneath a lens that focuses those rays directly onto your cornea.

Through a 16-stop neutral density filter (and electronic viewfinder), I took a test shot of the sun to see if I could pull off shooting freehand with the quite-heavy 200mm f/2.8 lens or if I should cannibalize my wide-angle tripod setup for the extra stability.

I have to hand it to Nikon: their image stabilization is top-notch. (Auto-focus was a bit of a struggle, though, as the lens allowed me to focus at true ∞, which was a hair too far to achieve the best sharpness one can through the 3.24x10^40 air molecules between the sun and my image sensor. All subsequent sun photos below were shot with manual focus while free-handing it. Next time, I'm bringing another tripod... and a bigger lens.)

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