31 Jul Eclipster Sightings at Homestead

So Homestead’s big event of the year is the solar eclipse that’s happening on August 21st. We’re almost exactly in the middle of the line of totality, so we will have two minutes and 34 seconds of darkness. We’re expecting thousands of people to show up at the park that day, and all the hotels in Beatrice and in Lincoln are completely full already. We’re having NASA scientists come give presentations that weekend, and Bill Nye is coming on the day of the eclipse. We get so many calls to the park every day asking about the eclipse. The only thing that we might get more calls about is the senior lifetime park passes, which are increasing in price exactly a week after the eclipse. So we’ve been working a lot on getting ready for the eclipse. I learned how to put subtitles on videos this week, so I’ve been working on making those for a few videos. All of the videos we post to social media are supposed to be closed captioned, that way they are accessible to more people. Closed captioning a video involves typing up all of the dialog and sounds, and coordinating timing the text with the audio. I also was in a video for the park last week, showing off our eclipse merchandise such as an “eclipster” (eclipse + hipster = eclipster). It was a lot of fun to film, and we finally got it up online this week. https://www.facebook.com/HomesteadNM/videos/10155407005790242/   I also helped take down and pack up one of our current exhibits today, an exhibit on loan from the South Dakota Historical Society of newspaper illustrations depicting life during homesteading in South Dakota. We had to check over each frame for damage and then pack them up in their crates, making space for the new exhibit going up on Monday of a series of quilts illustrating the stages of the eclipse.