Total Eclipse!

The Eclipse Starts!

We traveled to Nashville, TN where my daughter lives (and saved the $1000 per night the hotels wanted for Eclipse weekend) and set up in her parking lot. I packed my white light solar grab n'go observatory--ST80 scope, iOptron EQPro mount, and DS16C imager. The DS16C has a very large imaging chip and gave a huge FOV with the ST80.

Crescent Shadows

I took single images as we waited for totality. The sky was about 50% clouded, which created some anxiety! At T minus 5, a dense cloud drifted across the sun, but it passed by with 2 minutes to Totality. As the Diamond Ring appeared, I put the scope into movie mode.

The movie was captured at 3 FPS using the native resolution of the DS16C, which is  4640 x 3506 in the .SER format (file size was 45G).  All the single images in this post were taken from this movie. I also did a 1080p AVI conversion.

Totality!!

The 1600 or so frames in the original movie cover the 1 minute 55 seconds or so of totality. Played back at 60FPS, the movie lasts 27 seconds. I also played with the exposure during capture to try (not very successfully) to capture coronal details. At the end of the movie, I place the solar filter back on the scope and the growing crescent of sun can be seen.

Here are some more stills from the movie:

A Quiet Corona--typical of a solar minimum

The End!

We also saw shadow bands! Ephemeral and difficult to see (many veteran eclipse watchers have never seen them) shadow bands occur just before totality and can also be seen as the sun emerges from eclipse. we were lucky enough to see them at both points, but this movie was taken in the moments before totality. The phenomenon lasts only a few seconds, but I had my phone out and grabbed 4 seconds of the faint ripples as they moved across the parking lot. The bands are much more visible in the original movie; the Youtube conversion seems to have removed some of the detail, but full screen will show the ripples a little better.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBULvbggRqk

All-in all, it was an amazing--and all too short--experience. Totality lasted 1 minute 55 seconds. It was my first total eclipse and I'm now an addict. Roll on 2024!

Postscript:  I checked the records for my home weather station on eclipse day, and at maximum eclipse here in Indiana (where the eclipse was not total), the station recorded a drop in temperature. Whether it was just a coincidence, I am not sure, but here is the data:

The eclipse was 90% at 2:22 pm local time.