I have been lurking on here for a couple months after recently starting my journey into astrophotography. I have gained a lot of inspiration from the awesome images posted on this site. I decided to sign up today. I just recently photographed the annular eclipse, and it was my first non-partial eclipse to witness and photograph. Here is how my trip went....

I took my first ever image of an eclipse back in 2017 from my home in Alabama. I did it on a whim and just taped a pair of eclipse glasses over my lens. After that experience, I knew I wanted to get some decent images of this one.

I drove 12 hours to Hondo, Texas and stayed at a hotel that was in the path of annularity. Clouds were going to be my biggest issue. Best I could tell they were supposed to blow over by 9am and the eclipse should start around 10:20. Well it wasn't looking good the morning of, so I drove an hour NW to Vanderpool, Texas. I got there at 9:15am and I was still covered up in clouds. Desperation was setting in. I drove another 45 minutes N and finally broke out of the clouds a little after 10.

I pulled over on the highway and in pure chaos, I managed to get everything setup 2 minutes before the action started. I used an R7, RF100-500 with a 1.4x extender. I placed it on a skywatcher sky adventurer GTI mount that I roughly polar aligned using a compass and offsetting for true north. Well, the solar filter I was using really blocked too much light. I had to bump my ISO up to 640 just to get 1/10th of a second shutter speeds at F10. The wind was blowing strong too and I was worried about blurry images.

My backup plan was to use my R5 and EF100-400 IS II + 1.4x iii extender. Two days before the eclipse, the astrosolar film I ordered almost a month ago finally arrived. I made a DIY filter with the film but unfortunately, I had full cloud cover both days and I wasn't able to test it out. This film is optical density 3.8 compared to the standard viewing safe optical density 5.0. So, it's supposed to allow much faster shutter speeds.

After setting up the R7, I did some test shots with the R5 and I was able to shoot 1/6400th of second, F10, ISO 100. Thank goodness. I took images every 5 minutes and after shooting with the R7, I shot with the R5 handheld. Motion blur was an issue on the R7 but I took a lot of extra images at each interval.

After reviewing the images, I was quite surprised by how well the handheld R5 images turned out. This is the composite image I wanted to capture. It's not perfect. My timing was slightly off due to changing locations, but all things considered I couldn't be happier. I almost skipped out on this eclipse, but now I'm so glad I went. MANY lessons were learned that I can use next April.

Thanks for looking,

Matt