The Great American Eclipse of 2017 as seen from around Makanda IL, very close to the center-line of the eclipse,  and in the region of maximum duration of totality.  From here I will live tweet out and attempt to stream images.    
There are several teams conducting research in the area.  My personal interest is in replicating the observations of Arthur Eddington in relation to the gravitational predictions of Albert Einstein.   Einstein predicted that the apparent position of the stars in the region of the sky near where the sun will appear will shift due to the space-time being curved by the mass of the sun.   Eddington after many tries was able to show that Einstien was exactly correct.  ANY tiny deviation from that would be interesting.  

I expect to confirm those findings once more, and it seems I am the only one here even bothering to see how they hold up given modern equipment with better angular resolution. 

Below is my Twitter feed.  Check in there for at least high resolution images of totality.   In the meantime I will tweet about my experiences in the Carbondale / southern Illinois area in general.