A Starlink in My Suitcase

In April 2024, the Moon's shadow crossed Mazatlán, and I was standing under it with a cinema camera, hoping I'd done the math right.

I was there for SSERVI — one NASA program inside a much larger, NASA-wide broadcast of the total eclipse. My job was to lead our piece on the ground: the feed, the cameras, the broadcast tech, and a film I wanted to bring home. The Emmy that eventually came out of all this was never once in the room while we worked. I'll get to it, because people ask, but it's honestly the least interesting part of the story.

I went down with two jobs running side by side.

The first was to put the best possible picture into the national broadcast, and to earn the trust of the people running it. Those are the same job, really. Trust on a live broadcast doesn't get handed to you in a meeting — it shows up when your feed holds and the producer can stop worrying about your camera and look at everything else. I wanted the executive producer to be able to forget we were there. That's the whole compliment.

So I'd flown down months earlier for a test. You can't rehearse an eclipse — there isn't one to practice on — so we did the next best thing and shot the sun. My colleague's Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro, a long telephoto, neutral density, and a lot of trial and error trying to take the exposure values photographers use and translate them across the phases of an eclipse into something that would hold up on video. Totality, the diamond ring, the partial phases — each one wants a different exposure, and you get exactly one chance to be right on all of them, in order, live. What I landed on was flexibility without ever giving up quality. Both, or it wasn't worth doing.

The Starlink is the part everyone laughs at. I wasn't about to gamble a national broadcast on whatever the resort's wifi felt like doing that morning, so I brought my own internet. I checked the larger Starlink dish in my luggage — it barely fit — and when airport security ran the bag, they pulled it and asked me, in Spanish, what it was. With the little Spanish I have, I told them it was for work, for internet. The guy shrugged and waved me through. So there I was, flying into Mexico with a satellite dish in my checked bag, because NASA had handed us a single encoder and the rest was on me. You do not get a second take on a total eclipse.

That was the first job. The second one was harder, and it's the one I care most about.

We also had to come home with a film. And the trouble with making a film about an eclipse is that the eclipse isn't the most interesting thing to point a camera at. Everyone has seen the disk go dark through a telescope. What you haven't seen is the face of the person standing next to you when it happens.

So that's what we shot. The anticipation, the reactions, the loud and the quiet — the people, not just the sky. There were locals, tourists, a group who'd come from Korea, kids everywhere. We'd gone down to be useful to Mazatlán, not just to broadcast from it: public talks, outreach with the local astronomy community, the people who had been pointing telescopes at that sky long before NASA showed up. Some of the most beautiful shots in the film came from locals who flew their own drones and simply handed us the footage. I wove all of it together with the real commentary from the broadcast and tried to build a few minutes that let the size of the thing actually land on you.

We turned it around fast — that part mattered, getting it out while people still had the feeling. I got the footage to our post team and directed the shape of the story, though I'll be honest that our editor, Rica, needs almost none of that; she's talented and I can mostly stay out of her way. During the eclipse, my colleague Mike ran the broadcast camera so I could put mine on the crowd. None of this is a one-person thing.

The ending I didn't write. We had a group chat going, and Brian — who actually keeps up with Facebook — saw a post going around from the local astronomy community about what the day had meant. The words were Pollo Sato's:

Mazatlan is more than just a location on the map; today, it becomes a beacon for dreamers, adventurers and those who find beauty in the cosmos.

Let this eclipse be a reminder of the incredible world we share and the connections that transcend distance and difference.

I read it and knew immediately it was the last line of the film. We put it at the end and gave him the credit. The words were his.

People cried watching it — including some who'd sat through plenty of these before. I don't bring that up to impress anyone. The feeling actually crossing over is the only thing I was ever checking for.

Here's the part about the award, since it's the question I always get. The broadcast was nominated for three Emmys and won two. There's a statue on my coffee table with my name on it, and I won't pretend it isn't a strange and wonderful thing to look at from time to time. But I was one person inside a large team that earned that, and the credit belongs across all of them. I'm proud of it the way you're proud of something you got to be part of.

What I'm actually proud of is quieter. A total eclipse is one of the only days where every single thing I know how to do gets used at once — cameras, color, networking, broadcast hardware, story. Most days you only get to use a slice of it. That day I needed all of it, and it held. Getting to connect those dots is the privilege of my whole career, and I don't take it for granted.

But the thing I kept isn't the statue, or the feed, or the math on the exposure. It's Pollo's line. He's right — for one day the place became more than a point on a map, and a few of us who cared enough to show up and do it right got to be a small part of why. That's the only scoreboard I've ever really cared about.