My Eclipse Story
Living just west of Toronto, I was just out of totality. Day before forecasts anywhere in my area were unpromising, including Niagara Falls where the crowds were headed.  South and east of Montreal seemed a sure bet, but at least an eight-hour drive in the best of times. Forecasts to the south-west were promising to clear just after noon, so I filled the car with equipment (I took so much stuff, just in case…), and then my wife and I drove 2 hours to the small city of Simcoe, Ontario, just north of Lake Erie, where we found a baseball park to setup. 

The morning was totally cloudy, could not even seen the direction of the Sun. But cleared up right at 2 PM, just before first contact! At that point I was able to do the Polar and Solar alignment—my method is to tell my mount I want to Solar align, so it slews to where the Sun should be. I accept that position, then move the mount and alt/az knobs until the Sun is centered, making sure the mount is level. However, my camera went haywire at some point, it seemed to be imaging but was just sending noise. Took me a bit to figure out it wasn’t capturing images. After SW/camera reboot I was able to align. But a result I lost some of the early partial phases. 

Skies were clear for totality, which was awesome! This is my second Total Eclipse, but that was 45 years ago, so I had forgotten the intensity of the experience. The prominences were so bright, especially toward the  end of totality where the bright prominence on the southern limb grew in intensity. There was also a very large prominence to the west (right) that was easily visible. To the west particularly, where the edge of the shadow was closest, there was a beautiful sunset. It got very cold and somewhat windy and the birds were chattering like crazy. There was no lighting in the park, so it did get very dark. There was a nice Diamond Ring both in and out of totality, I’m posting the out one here, as I missed capturing the in. At then end of totality, which was 3 minutes long, someone let off fireworks, so it ended with a bang for the 30 or so people who were there. I was the only one there with a telescope, so some came by for a peak during the partial phases.

Equipment and Acquisition
I took my smaller Celestron 6SE with my f6.3 Celestron reducer to give me the widest field. I used my CGX mount, which while much lighter than my CEM70, is still a beast to lift. I really appreciate those who travel regularly to image, it is a lot of work!  I operated off two Celestron batteries, which are quite old now, so somewhat marginal. Fortunately, I found my ASI2600MC Pro runs without external power (with the cooler off), whatever the manual says (I think my new laptop USB port can supply enough power, my old laptop would not run the camera without external power). And I ran my laptop off its battery.

For totality, I used SharpCap at gain 200. SharpCap has a sequence editor, so I run a cycle of 9 images with no delay, starting at 0.5 ms up to 2 seconds exposures, then let that cycle repeat. I ended up with 90 images over the 3 minutes. I did not want to miss anything so when totality came, and after a few seconds of forgetting everything, I pushed run and then enjoyed the view. 

Note in taking off the solar filter the scope must have got jostled, so my image is not centered. But I realized this worked out well, because it allowed me to see the corona further out in some directions, than if I had just centered it.

Processing
The complication with reading 16 bit color raw fits files is that many programs don’t read them correctly or if they do, the resulting debayered image is not recognized by other programs. Fortunately I worked the process out before the eclipse day:
1)    I “stacked” the fits files in DeepSkyStacker. It registers zero stars, but still will “stack” a single fits file and save it as a debayered 32 bit tif.
2)    In Photoshop I converted to 16 bit files. There was a green cast to everything, easiest adjustment for this was HLVG in PS, worked like a charm.
3)    In Photoshop I did some color and curves adjustments, keeping it the same for all images. I found this gave me a better HDR effect than using the as-is images.
4)    Manually I aligned all the images in the sequence. In the end I did not use the 2 second exposure, it was clipped nearly everywhere so not useful. I saved each image as a 16 bit tif.
5)    In PhotoMatix Pro, which is a standalone program, I tonemapped each image sequence using "contrast optimizer", at maximum strength to bring up as much corona as possible.
6)    HDR images came out with a lit new moon with visible detail. For the dark moon images, I added the 0.5 ms image manually to the HDR.
7)    The Diamond Ring images were taken at 0.5 ms and 1 ms, again, these were added manually to the HDR image taken right before the Rings appeared.

Next Steps
Partial phases coming as well as (hopefully) an animation of the eclipse, both currently in production…