These are shots taken of the eclipse through my telescope with a Nikon D7500 mounted at prime focus. I had planned to run the camera with Eclipse Orchestrator software, but didn’t have time to get that set up and tested before the trip, so I had to manually trigger the shutter every few minutes. This ended up not really being a big deal, but I definitely want to get that computer control working for the next time. I also had trouble with the declination motor on the telescope mount not working, so we had to manually adjust the mount periodically as the sun moved across the view area. This is why the images are all over the frame. At least since the background is pure black, I can always recenter them later in Photoshop.
The telescope is a Celestron Omni XLT 120 with a 1000mm focal length. The mount is a brand new Sky-Watcher HEQ5 equatorial mount. I ordered it two months before the trip, but with delivery problems, I got it only only a couple of weeks before we left, and never had a chance to test it. Again, lack of testing before the trip cost me some.
I focused the telescope just using the camera’s small viewscreen, and I got incredibly lucky to get great focus. The sunspots are even really well visible. For the next trip, however, I’m going to output the camera view to a 16 in. portable monitor so that I can really see the detail.
I bracketed most of the exposures from 1/800 s to 1/2500 s, but 1/1000 s was really the sweet spot for the entire eclipse. This is surprising to me that the same exposure worked well for both the full-disc sun and the annulus.
All in all, I’m very happy with the photos I got, but there were many lessons learned for next time. And plans for bigger and better set-ups, too.
