solar

tl;dr: This website is currently being hosted off-grid, on a cluster of Raspberry Pis, via 4G LTE—or at some points through the same tunnel via WiFi if signal strength gets too low. Here's the GitHub repo for the project.

Note: The website was down for a few hours this morning, as shortly after this post I started getting a 40-50 Mbps flood of POST requests (over 6 million in a 30 minute time frame)... and yeah, no way the little Pi cluster could handle that. Thanks, Internet. It's back up through Cloudflare now, and I'll post more on this 'fun' experience later.

A couple weeks ago, after months of preparation, I took my 4-node Turing Pi 2 cluster (see my earlier review) to my cousin's farm, and ran this website (JeffGeerling.com) on it, live on the Internet—completely disconnected from grid power or hard-wired Internet.

Last year, when I first learned that my house was in the path of totality for this year's eclipse, I immediately logged into BorrowLenses and rented a Nikon 200-500mm f/5.6 VR lens (for photography—it's now on my wishlist) and then purchased a set of eclipse glasses for my family, and materials to build a solar filter for the lens.

I've learned from Reddit's DIY community that people like the end result first... then an explanation, so:

See the full-size image of the Eclipse composite on Flickr.

tl;dr: Buy a step-up ring of appropriate size for your lens, buy a solar filter sheet, paste the sheet into the ring, screw the ring on your lens. And practice before the solar eclipse on August 21!

See my full post with the final result here: Photographing the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse.