Eclipse Prep

I plan on traveling to Nashville, TN for the solar eclipse on August 21. My plan is to take white light images with my SLRs, plus scope and solar filter. Unfortunately, the white light scope I usually use for solar work, an old 1995-vintage ETX 90, has stopped tracking. Although it worked a few weeks ago, it refuses to track now, even with fresh batteries. I think I'll probably take it off the base and add a dovetail, eventually.

The saving grace is that the filter pretty much fits my ST-80, and the 80 has a wider FOV than the ETX, which should enable some nice corona captures when I whip off the filter at totality. Today was a test of the EQPro, ST-80 and Mallincam DS16C combo, and it worked very well. The FOV is wide and the detail captured is very satisfying. Here are a couple of shots, with AR 2664 is just visible as a dot above and to the right of center in these images. I enhanced the images with an unsharp mask to bring out the "orange peel" texture. I've included an unprocessed image to show how well this combo captures this detail. The first two images, below, are processed, the last is not.