In attracted to celestial events where I see the universe in motion. It grounds my relationship to the players. Waiting under Central Texas clouds seemed too risky for such a rare event. We had the good fortune to see and image the entire eclipse from Little Rock.

I put together a 6k time lapse which is rendered below in HD video. I used my Questar 1280/89mm f/15 telescope with a Sony a7iii full frame mirrorless camera. A Baader AstroSolar filter was used for the partial eclipse frames

I was able to set up early enough to do a partial, az, drift alignment that required only minor adjustment during the 3 hour eclipse. With a level and compass it is easy to get polar alignment altitude within a degree. Azimuth is harder with all the bits of metal around to fool a compass, readjusting that to minimize drift up or down works well.

The NASA DSCOVR EPIC camera takes several high resolution images of the Sun facing hemisphere of the Earth every day from near the Lagrange 1 point about a million miles sunward from the earth. It’s a spectacular way to watch the Moons shadow pass across the Earth. I processed the NASA images into the GIF animation below.

Thin high clouds during totality make getting detailed solar corona images difficult. That will be my next challenge.