Partial Solar Eclipse - Animation (20221025)

Tip:See a bigger single shot of the maximum local occultation

It had rained all the night and in the morning still most of the sky was covered with clouds. I hoped for occasional clear spots every now and then, so I could catch at least some single shots.

To my big surprise and joy at ~09:30h (CEST) the sky rapidly cleared up. I hurried to get my  mobile setup out, between the trees where I expected the full eclipse would become visible.

First time ever I did not use my simple photo tripod but my iOptron CEM26EC mount. I did my best to roughly align it towards north by estimating the direct N-S line from a peak of our high southern mountain ridge. I had looked this 'geographic south' indicator up with a topographic map in the first Covid-19 lockdown already from my balcony, when nobody was allowed to leave the house after 9pm ... and thus no way to use Polaris at night to set things up.

Fine tuning was then done with a thin pole and the Sun's shadow casted on the mounts conrol box to parallel this with the shadow of the pole with the help of the very useful Solar Polar Alignment App. I had used this with good success for many times.

Then I attached my RasPi4 with the very nice Astroberry operating system and FireCapture to the mount, connected it and also the ASI533MC Pro with the Celestron Power Tank, checked the USB connection and was ready to observe the Sun.

Manual focusing my Canon EF 1:2.8/300mm + TC-1.4x (max. focal length F=420mm) in direct sunlight on a tablet's screen (with VNC) is really hard to achieve ...

Finally, we had perfect deep blue sky and good seeing, so I could capture the whole eclipse from start to end.

As I didn't know how to setup a schedule für FireCapture to automatically take a 20 (or 50) image series every two minutes, I had to do it manually. With a stop watch in hands ... unfortunately having some 'bumps' in my animation because some friendly neighbors were so curious what I was doing there and I felt the need to explain and demonstrate them something. Luckily, I had setup a 30x50 spotting scope on a tripod also, and had one of these cardboard eclipse 'glasses' at hands.

In the end I got ~40 GB of data in SER and TIFF files which I had to align and crop and process with Planetary System Stacker (PSS), PIPP and ImPPG basically. This animation is the first useful result after way more then 24 hours of work, all together.