You can still fly recreationally even after obtaining your Part 107 license.

I think the Mini 3 Pro will blow away the Mini 2 in terms of image quality.

He's taking pictures of a UFO. The other guys missed it because they were all focused (yeah, pun intended) on the bird.

I've done a bunch with my Mavic Mini drone. Three of these were taken with that: fog over the reservoir at sunrise, a shelf cloud taken from 400' up, and a very colorful sunrise. The eclipse picture was a collage of several shots.

What about something like a Joby Gorillapod? They don't want tripods sticking out and tripping people, but I would think something small like a Joby would work if you could wrap it around something sturdy. It's certainly not going to be in anyone's way.

One trick I've found is that if you have a layer of clouds in the area and it doesn't look like a sunrise or sunset will happen, look toward the horizon. If there's a gap where there are no clouds toward the horizon, the sun may just light up the bottoms of the clouds. Those are the best.

It's either a deer testing out its cloaking device, or it's shifting to a parallel universe and you managed to capture the moment.

Might have to print off one for the stepmonster for Christmas.

Shot with them my Rebel T3 and RMC Tokina 28mm f/2.8 lens.

(Download)

I haven't seen anyone mention adjusting the viewfinder focus with the the dioptric wheel. It's located at the top right side of the viewfinder. First, put the camera on a tripod, then use LiveView to adjust your focus (zoom in 10x if you need to). Switch out of LiveView and look through the viewfinder. Move the dioptric wheel until it's sharp through the viewfinder.

Once you know the viewfinder view is calibrated, you can do what someone else suggested, and what I do: rock the focus knob back and forth and watch to see when it's obviously out of focus. Find those two spots, then move to the center between those two out-of-focus spots.

It gets a lot easier with practice. I've started getting back into using manual lenses, and it takes some definite practice to master since modern DSLRs don't have the old split screen / checkerboard pattern the old SLRs had that made the job so much easier.

The smaller images that are part of your post are different. The second one definitely has a purple look. When I click the download links and look at each image, they appear identical.