ARock; -your eclipse image

[BruceHinton]

Hello ARock,

Your projected eclipse image reminds me of the 1st time I managed such a thing, and I also am curious about the gear you used.

Long away and far ago, I had just returned from Turkey and Germany during my time in USA military service, (70s !), and had in my bag a Nikkor 500mm mirror, and a 24mm wide angle, with 85 deg. FOV. (24x36 frame for film. Modern folks with mainstream DSLRs are usually not thinking this lens is very wide, maybe 60 deg or less for those smaller imaging sensors.)

Tripod mounted the 500, used a bellows directly on it, and the 24 got an adapter to gender reverse its mount for the back of the bellows, so both lenses fronted away from each other. Image was "Yuuuuge", we had to rush for a bigger board to project onto.

No total eclipses due here till 2045, but in 2024, Texas to Maine!

Annular or partial will move from west coast to Texas 2023.

I think I need to look into a solar filter!

[ARock]

I had bought my ST80 clone, a Meade Adventure 80 a few days before the eclipse. I remembered this technique from a transit of mercury I had watched thanks to a teacher from my school days. It was the easiest to setup on a Alt/Az mount. The screen is a cutting board wrapped with paper mounted on the tripod that came with the Meade Adventure 80 (which is quite useless for the telescope) using a gooseneck clamp. I also put to use one of the colored glass planetary filters which I had bought early in my astro days, and hadn't really found much use for. I had to track the scope manually and move the screen manually but it worked fine enough for the small family outreach.

Since that time, I have built a Sun Funnel, and bought a simple EQ mount (EXOS Nano EQ) for the 80mm and motorized it. A sun funnel is a closed system and considered to be safer than the open projection I had used before. I plan to watch the transit of Mercury later this year using this setup.