Be aware - there may be hotels who don't know why people are booking that weekend/Monday in April so soon, why their hotel is full.

They will learn VERY quickly.

Last time, we had three club members who lost their "locked-in, guaranteed" reservations three to six months ahead of August, because the hotels realized that the rooms they booked at $50/night could be sold at $300+ a night instead. Luckily, we had LOTS of backups sites planned. They were able to meet at the family farm of one club member south of the path, then drive up early in the morning to a site along the centerline for a great view.

Just plan for something like that, just in case.

Texas. Basically, Dallas/Fort Worth and to the south.

I am an Eclipse Ambassador (education project) and have been working on planning for this since 2018. I have a number of sites all over Texas, planning for inclement weather. My primary site is near the centerline, with 4:15 of totality. It is family land, and will be available to our local astronomy club members (and a few professional astronomers coming to town). I will also be doing a live YT broadcast from there, with 4K/6K cameras streaming live and recording for later.

Secondary and tertiary sites are located south and west of me - Lampassas, Fredricksburg, Kerrville, Vanderpool. I have contacts with clubs in those areas, and I want to have reciprocal agreements - if it is cloudy here and clear there, we have places to go, and vice versa.

I have contacts with an eclipse-chasing group coming from Europe. They are wary of going to Mexico due to the drug violence, and without knowing anyone there they do not want to show up and find out they were scammed and have nowhere to go. So, Texas it is for them.

This is the site you want for planning:

http://xjubier.free.fr/en/site_pages/solar_eclipses/TSE_20240408_pg01.html

The detail.

This mosaic of 12 overlapping subframes is shrunk down considerably from the original image, which is about 940 mpx. The full image is more than 2GB as just a TIFF, too large for a PNG and hard to work with in any case. I have had to shrink it down considerably in order for it to be usable at all. At original scale, this is the Apollo 11 landing site near Sabine Crater.

This is the sharpest lunar image I have made so far.

Celestron C11 at f10

Ioptron CEM60EC

ZWO ASI183MC-Pro at -17C

6,000 frames at 25ms exposure, 0 gain, 12 sections, 500 images per section.

Stacking best 10% in autoStakkert, 3x drizzle. Processing each stack takes between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours.

Processing in Photoshop for mosaic stitching, color saturation, and brightness. Topaz Sharpening AI for details and noise reduction.