Last Total Solar Eclipse Posting

Previously, I posted a 10-image sun sequence pic during the solar eclipse of Monday, August 21, 2017 as seen from Columbia, Missouri. The previous earliest eclipse phase time for that posting was at 12:15 pm CDT, a full half-hour after the start of C1 (first contact). From 11:40 am-12:15 pm I was being frustrated by the fact that I could not seemingly capture an image of the sun, evening using a 9-stop bracket on my Nikon D7200 DSLR camera. My back-of-camera monitor appeared totally black during these early capture attempts, and I could not understand what was causing this despite atmospheric haze and passing clouds. Even Adobe Lightroom did not appear to show anything captured (as it turned out I was shooting the sun with too fast of a shutter speed for the weather conditions that prevailed). Then, just for the heck of it, I selected one of the black images in Lightroom and moved the exposure slider all the way forward. I could see a faint image of the sun on it! I did this to all the "black" images and was able to use the best images (from bracketing). This now gave me a total of 13 images, with the first--the full sun at lower left of the combination image above--starting at 11:40 am, five minutes before C1. The white blob in the third image from the upper right is the last big flash of light from the sun before the diamond ring phase.

The settings info for each image, starting from the lower left: 1. 11:40 am CDT, 1/400 sec, f/5.6, 320 ISO, 300mm focal length; 2. 11:50 am, 1/160 sec, f/5.6, 320 ISO, 300mm; 3. 12:00 pm, 1/50 sec, f/5.6, 320 ISO, 270mm; 4. 12:10 pm, 1/400 sec, f/5.3, 320 ISO, 270mm; 5. 12:20 pm, 1/40 sec, f/5.6, 320 ISO, 270mm, 6. 12:30 pm, 1/100 sec, f/5.6, 400 ISO, 270mm; 7. 12:40 pm, 1/25 sec, f/5.6, 640 ISO, 270mm, 8. 12:50 pm, 1/5 sec, f/5.3, 640 ISO, 270mm; 9. 1:00 pm, 1/30 sec, f/5.3, 640 ISO, 270mm, 10. 1:05 pm, 1/13 sec, f/5.3 sec, 640 ISO, 270mm; 11. 1:12 pm, 1/30 sec, f/5.3, 640 ISO, 270mm; 12. 1:12 pm, 1/20 sec, f/5.3, 640 ISO, 270mm; 13. 1:12 pm, 1/50 sec, f.5.3, 640 ISO, 270mm.

Again, I selected the best of nine bracketed images to create each sun image.