Solar eclipse 2021-it was a beauty!
The alarm went at 4:35am: “cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo” why I picked that, or the time for the alarm escapes me, it just seemed about right. The cats were like “WTF is that? Is there a bird inside?” Then they came to the kitchen to beg. Groot has a routine, a few crunchies or you will be hounded, stepped in front of, head butted..etc…Humans are SO hard to train he keeps telling his friends, sigh…and there was coffee to be made, an essential ingredient in early morning photography for myself, not Mike. The thought of operating the camera in an un-caffeinated state is a bit frightening;)
Mike had set his Lundt 152 solar scope up the previous afternoon and covered it in case of dew. He wasn’t planning on doing any photography, just visual as the eclipse would be so close to the horizon the seeing (Atilla Danko’s explanation is far better than mine for newbies to “seeing” ) “Excellent seeing means at high magnification you will see fine detail on planets. In bad seeing, planets might look like they are under a layer of rippling water and show little detail at any magnification, but the view of galaxies is probably undiminished. Bad seeing is caused by turbulence combined with temperature differences in the atmosphere.” When you are looking at objects close to the horizon you are also looking through much more atmosphere than what you would be when looking straight up-about 250 miles of atmosphere straight up, much more looking out over the earth:) Hope that makes sense! So, no, Mike wasn’t going to photograph anything! But I was going to try! It’s just a sunrise with a moon in front of it? Right? ha!
The sunrise was beautiful! It gave me time to focus on the furthest away trees on the camera live view, which I can also zoom in 10x to be extra sure of focus. The horizon was a wobbling mass of unsteadiness…ie, bad seeing, as Mike had predicted. It looks like a mirage on a hot road when it is really wobby, not the best conditions for photography either but what the heck! It’s now or wait until 2024!
Beautiful view in Mike’s solar scope, he looked, I went back to work with the Canon6D and Tamron 150-600G2! At first all we could see was a glow then slowly the sun, and moon made their way higher above the first band of clouds. Camera settings ended up being ISO 100-F40-1/1250 sec at 600mm. Trying to cut that light out! Me experimenting!
We kept hoping the fast moving clouds would move away and we did get a few breaks as the sun continued to rise! Mike has a solar white filter, for use on smaller telescopes that can also fit over the end of my Tamron lens so we gave that a try! It took a few adjustments on manual mode ISO 250-1/50 sec-F6.3 at 600mm:)
That was pretty cool, so we went back and forth, telescope, camera, telescope, what a beautiful way to spend the early morning! We truly had the perfect seat to watch it rise at the far end of the lake from a beautiful sunrise to eclipse!
Rocket then said it was time to go back to bed, he couldn’t see a thing with the glasses on and was going to sleep! Crazy humans;) Saludos amigos! Hope you enjoyed the show!
