The Ideum team traveled to Texas to capture images from the total solar eclipse. This was our third trip in the last several years; we traveled to Nebraska in 2017 and to Argentina in 2019. Each trip was in support of an experimental mobile application that shared images and data with NASA scientists. Those two projects took some pretty amazing smart phone photos considering the types of mobile devices available at the time. You can see our photos from Nebraska and from Argentina. 

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The weather was a major factor this trip, but despite overcast skies, for just a brief moment we managed to see the total solar eclipse. As if on cue, the clouds parted during totality, and the rest of the day is forecast for rain. We captured images with an 8K camera and a solar filter. You can view higher-resolution images on the Ideum Instagram and on the Ideum Flickr site.

In addition to the high end gear, we also used Kickstarter telescope device called Hestia, which is a telescope add-on device for mobile devices. We described it earlier as the hardware equivalent of our initial software projects; attempts to greatly simplify image capturing on a mobile device. We are pretty happy with how that device worked. 

This eclipse, while we were just participants, we set up the SunSketcher application, which uses source code from our past projects. We hope they got the images and data they need for their experiment, and were happy provide some data for their interesting project.

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Our whole team here in Fredericksburg is grateful for the opportunity to witness and capture this remarkable event!

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