Eclipse is Coming

I’ve been silent for the past year because…well, I’ve done pretty much nothing astronomy-wise. Life has kept me busy. But I’m fortunate enough to have relatives that live pretty much on the centerline of this eclipse (within a couple hundred meters or less, depending in which online map I consult). So, I’ve got 4 minutes of totality to look forward to. Weather permittting…

And statistically, it’s just a bad time of year. If I had relatives in Mexico…. But more-or-less from Texas up through Missouri, it’s statistically little different in terms of chance of clear weather. Further east it gets worse, so I’m about as good as it gets from inside the US.

I have been testing my configuration, but today is cloudy/stormy, so it’s an indoor test only. I’ve discovered the Backyard EOS (BYE) is slightly faster than Astro Photography Tool (APT). It’s not much, but it’s noticeable. My planned 8-exposure sequence during totality takes about 24 seconds with APT but 20 seconds with BYE. That means I should be able 12 full sequences with BYE, which is what I plan to do.

During the partial, I need to get out and take some test exposures. I should have already done that, but Life…. Oh well, I should have at least one good clear day to take a set of test exposures with the solar film in place to know what exposure is ideal and then to also set up two longer exposures in case we have light haze. I’ll have plenty of time to adjust that plan if I need to, but I plan to just let it run, a group of 3 about every minute for the whole duration, with the plan to make a time lapse later.

My go-to resource for planning exposures during totality is Mr. Eclipse, with his table. I have a RedCat 51 (f/4.9, 250mm FL) and a AstroTech AT66ED (f/6, 400mm FL, no longer made) which should work nicely in terms of framing. I have a site where I can set up the night before to do a proper polar alignment so I should rarely have to make any tracking adjustments. They’ll be mounted side-by-side on an iOptron CEM45 with a very nice ADM mini-MAX Alt-Az pointing saddle to insure they are truly colinear.

The only thing I can’t plan for is the weather. I don’t have any backup location for a Sunday night dash.