North Brunswick man travels to Oregon to experience totality

Jennifer Amato, Managing Editor

NORTH BRUNSWICK – At around 9:50 a.m. PST on Aug. 21, Benjamin Funk was standing 15 feet from where he slept the night before in Crooked River Ranch in Oregon.
A halo came over with a purplish glow, and a breeze caused the weather to drop about 10 degrees.
The crossing of the moon in front of the sun accelerated –and everything got dark.
“The people who were 50 feet away from me, I couldn’t see,” he said.
The sun returned to its normal state and the weather returned to its original temperature of 78 degrees.
Though total darkness lasted for just 1 minute, 36 seconds, the process of the entire solar eclipse lasted about 40 minutes.
“As long as you were standing in totality, it was an experience,” he said.
Armed with his Canon EOS 6t camera with a 300 mm lens with a 2x teleconverter – which he spent six months learning how to use for this very moment – the North Brunswick resident traveled to Oregon to experience the eclipse phenomenon because he is a limo driver by day but an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer by night.
“It really makes you feel how vast the universe is,” Funk said. “This stuff is not just up there for people like me to get a telescope and look at.”

The self-proclaimed “science geek” began specializing in black and white photos and doing his own printwork in the late 1980s. He then decided to spend his 62nd birthday this year watching the eclipse out West because he was captivated by Oregon while vacationing there two years ago.
He watched the eclipse in 1998 and said he “waited 19 years for this.”
“After it’s there, your eyes almost well with tears because you realize you’re standing in the shadow of a rare celestial body: the moon,” Funk said.
He said the experience was amazing, though a three-hour trip after the eclipse took him 11 hours to travel. He said it were as if 10 Woodstocks were happening at the same time from coast to coast. However, he chose to stay south of the town of Madras to avoid the thousands of people expected to show; there were only about 10 people where he was viewing the sky.
He credits the success of his photographic images of the eclipse to Fred Espenak, known as Mr. Eclipse, whom he corresponded with about how to capture the perfect photo. The setting Funk used was ISO-100 at f/8. The first exposure was 1/1000 of a second; each succeeding exposure was three clicks of the menu wheel to capture all of the features of totality.
 
“I thought I was going to get a good picture. I didn’t think I was going to get fantastic pictures,” he said. “There’s no going back. You gotta get it right the first time.”
His next goal is to watch the eclipse scheduled for April 8, 2024. He said he plans to retire to North Carolina but will drive to Texas because the state is known for its clear skies.
Contact Jennifer Amato at [email protected].