Solar Eclipse equipment

In order of priority:
My family and myself with 3 pairs of eyes and eclipse shades, hopes for clear skies.

Probably binoculars, mini-tripod, Sony DSC-V3 digital camera, Sony digital camcorder and some solar filters.

Assuming it works (it's allergic to humidity) the camcorder will roll unattended to maybe catch the shadow coming. If I think of it I'll grab a few snapshots with the digital camera.

If there is room after my daughter's toys, I might bring a tripod, the Pentax PZ1 film camera with interval timer and a Celestron 500mm F5.6 Maksutov spotting scope lens.

I just saw sunshine for the first time since friday on the Antalya webcam:

www.weather-forecast.com/locations/Antalya.webcams.shtml

(A heck of a lot of wind too, judging by the whitecaps. Don't mind the clouds rolling off the mountains, there is still a bit of snow up there and I think rising air tends to make clouds on one side of most mountains even when there isn't a snow.)

BTW: For those using camcorders or digital cameras, you might try imaging the moon over the next few days around full moon. It will give you a rough idea of what shutter speeds or settings work well for the level of light during totality. When I swung my old JVC VHC-C (yuk) camcorder past the 1998 total solar eclipse in Antigua (just before asking my wife to marry me), the 1000/second "sports" shutter speed setting actually worked better than the default. Most camcorders have a default mode which makes dusk look like daylight and another setting which renders sunsets and dusks brightness levels darker but more accurately and with less grain. The "sports" mode may leave a trail of white lines around the Sun where a CCD pixels dumps its overflow onto adjacent pixels.

If anyone is still using VHS or VHSC camcorders, note that when you shut them off, the tape unloads and rewinds a bit. I lost about 1/4 of my footage of the 1998 eclipse because of that design feature. I should have used the Betamovie

P.S. I didn't make it to the Gonzaga lecture, but I'm listening to exerpts online. Anyone who has seen/heard this already knows everything I've mentioned here!