To answer your other question... You do not need image stabilization if you're on a tripod our s tracking mount. If your lens has it, it is easy to turn off.
Ditto the other comments on the 70-300.

I am an amateur astronomer and hobbyist photographer. I plan to take photos of the eclipse, but since it's a one time thing I cannot risk messing it up. I found this e-book by a well respected astronomer/photographer. It covers the full gamut from snapping shots with your cell phone to taking high power photos with a telescope and video and everything in between. I think it's well worth the $9.99 it cost me. (I have no connection to this book other than to be a happy customer.)
http://www.amazingsky.com/tablet/eclipsebook.html

I ordered a sheet of the Baader film and made filteres for 2 scopes, a camera lens and a pair of binos all for about $30. I used Baader's instructions. The only other materials are cardboard, double sided tape and hot glue. It was easy and fun. I am an amateur astronomer and we've been using this film for many years for observing sunspots and eclipses.

Despite the advice to use AI servo and BBF, the bird in the 4th image appears to be in the zone of focus but it's not sharp. I'd still suspect camera shake. 1/640 isn't all that fast of a shutter speed, considering your effective focal length is 640mm. Nevertheless, you might want to check your lens/camera fine tune focus calibration.

no.

My walk-around lens for my 7dm2 is the Canon 15-85. It effectively gives you about the same range as the 24-105 does on a full frame. The 15-85 is not an L lens but it is well built and performs very well for me.

My slide projector still worked but after we selected about 200 of our favorites, we sent them off to Scan Cafe. Several weeks later they came back ( from India? maybe) along with a CD containing the digital version. The copies were OK, not great, but OK. Considering my photographic skills back in the day, I was satisfied. The actual review of several boxes of slides with the old projector and our kids was a ton of fun.
Bill

I use Synchtoy from Microsoft as well. It is free. I can designate which folders I want to back up and to where. You can schedule it to run on a recurring basis or run it manually. A nice feature is that it does incremental backups and supposedly keeps track of files that have been renamed or moved around. Since it only copies changes, it is relatively fast. The following is from SynchToy's help menu:

SyncToy helps you save time, minimize network usage, and save disk space by only copying when necessary.

The simple, fast, and familiar Windows interface lets you point and click to define your folders and the SyncToy actions you want performed on each folder pair. You choose the appropriate action when you create a folder pair, and the action determines how SyncToy handles file conflicts such as:

Files that have been renamed in both folders,
Files deleted from one folder and renamed in the other,
Files renamed in one folder and modified in the other, and
Many other file conflict situations.
SyncToy enables you to save how you want your folder pairs synced so you can sync again and again with a single click of a button.

SyncToy lets you sync a single pair of folders or all of your folder pairs with a single click. You can even set up SyncToy to run unattended .

I agree with rehess. I think the building is exposed properly for being in full sunlight. You used the sunny F16 rule. The trees and the shadows are underexposed because they're in the shade. In the second shot, the building is close to being blown out. Your best bet is like rehess and linda say, you'll need to pull up the shadows in post processing. Or, unless you really want to see all of the trees and shadows, crop them out somewhat.

I've had this happen several times. Here is what I do:
open device manager
expand Universal Serial Bus Controllers
right click on Generic Superspeed USB Hub and choose uninstall (do not delete)
reboot (when you reboot, the computer will fix itself)

or this process may or may not be applicable for your hardware

open device manager
expand Universal Serial Bus Controllers
find driver with yellow flag, and activate Renesas driver for it

It definitely depends on what you want to take photos of. Widefield photos of the Milky Way require a wide aperture, wide angle lens. I use a 12-24F4 on my crop sensor camera and I wish I had an F2.8 lens and a full frame camera.

If you want to take photos of celestial objects you're going to want an equatorial mount. You could piggy back your camera-lens combination on top of a telescope and let it ride along. You could skip the telescope and just mount the camera on the mount. There is even a drive called a barn-door tracker that you could make to carry your camera and allow it to track the sky for example http://petapixel.com/2013/08/10/buidling-a-diy-barn-door-tracking-mount-for-long-exposure-astrophotography/
or
http://makezine.com/2015/09/11/star-trackers-for-night-sky-photos/

Photos of planets and the moon are often done with webcams attached to telescopes. Software is used to extract the sharpest frames out of the movie and stack them to produce stunning NASA quality images.

Of course you could attach your camera directly to the telescope. This will produce the highest quality images at the cost of increased complexity and a steeper learning curve. Some of the high quality telescopes cost thousands of dollars, sturdy equatorial mounts and dedicated astro cameras push the investment much higher.

Beautiful wide image. Love it!

Thanks. We live on the lake and
also love hearing loons and other wildlife.

This loon was sitting on hr (or his??)the nest, which was quite close to a commonly used channel between two lakes. She seemed quite apprehensive about our presence so we kept moving slowly by as I took this photo. Other loons on the lake have already started hatching their chicks, so i hope this one succeeds.

(Download)

I can't speak to using the Canon 15-85 on your Sony, but I love it as my primary lens on my Canon 7DII. I really like the range of focal length and the images are very good too.