A few shots from my trip to Central Nevada to witness the May 20th Annular Eclipse in the direct line of the path.
Taken through a Meade 12" 3048mm f/10 scope.
This shot was taken with a P&S held up to the telescope's finder scope that also was solar filtered.
A sequence of 13 images composited in PS. These individual images were taken with the Canon 5D Mark II and 600mm f.4 with 1.4x extender. The last two images show the sun sitting behind the horizon.
You can view more images and read more about the trip and technical details on my blog. Sirius Productions, LLC
Well, it's a while before the next eclipse unless you plan on traveling but we have a Venus transit on June 5th and that is WAY MORE RARE then solar eclipses. It's only happened 7 or 8 times since man has been able to observe the sun. And you should have a decent view on Oregon.
Would you be willing to talk a bit about how you take these photos? What kind of equipment you need - including how you interface the camera with the telescope?
The telescope, the finder scope and the 600m lens were all covered with solar filters purchased from Thousand Oaks Optical outta AZ. The finder scope and the homemade glasses I made were covered with a solar filter material called "Black Polymer" The telescope had a "RG-Solar Film" filter. The scope is 12" in diameter but the filter is an Off-Axis type that only allows a small 4" window of light through. It's best seen in this photo. The white area of the filter is actually a solid plastic material of some sort. The small dark circle is the RG-Solar Film material. The advantage of the smaller circle is similar to stopping down the aperture on a camera. The sharpness and contrast is greatly improved. The 600mm had a completely different type of filter called "Type 2+ Glass" This filter belongs to a friend of mine and is designed for his 6" Newtonian telescope. He was out of town and unable to view the eclipse so he loaned it to me. It just so happens to fit perfectly over the lens shade of the 600mm. That's the best image I have showing the filter attached to the front of the 600mm. And that's me wearing my very fashionable Eclipse glasses. They are actually the 3D glasses you get at the movies. I simply cut the black polymer filter material out to cover the entire front of the plastic frames and glued it in place. They worked great and fit better then the cardboard versions all the planetariums were selling. You'll also note a bit of black gaff tape holding the filters snugly in place. You don't want a gust of wind knocking the filter off and blinding you instantly if you happen to be looking through the viewfinder. SAFETY FIRST!
The 600mm had a 1.4x on it giving me an effective focal length of 840mm @ f5.6 The images shot with this setup were shot at ISO 200 which in hind-site was a mistake because it required a shutter speed of 1/350sec. Way too slow for a 840mm tripod shot. I did control both cameras with Canon TC-80N3 remotes and used mirror lockup. I set the remote to fire every 15seconds and had the camera set to a 2 second timer mode. So what would happen is the timer would hit zero and the mirror would lock up then two seconds later the shutter would fire when the camera timer reached zero. This eliminated most of the vibration. ISO 800 or even 1600 would have given me much more forgiving shutter speeds.
As for the telescope, the camera is attached using standard astrophotography accessories called a T-Adaptor and T-Ring The T-Adaptor looks like this and is a standard scope accessory The top end of this photo is the end that attaches to the telescope after the eyepiece and diagonal mirror is removed.
The T-Ring is camera mount specific and looks like this. One end screws onto the bottom end of the T-Adaptor and the other end attaches to the camera just like a regular lens mount. The result looks like this. And you end up with one heck of a big telephoto lens! A 3048mm f/10 Prime lens to be exact. As you can see from this last shot, the sun/moon doesn't completely fit on the sensor and that's why the closeup shot At the beginning of the post are cropped. To get the entire disc in the image like those shown in the above 13 image composite I used images from the 840mm camera sequence. I've also edited them into a short video that can be viewed here:
I hope that answered any questions but if not, post away and I'll do my best.
And on my blog I've posted some more images as well as other astro photographic techniques that involve a combination of several methods. Sirius Productions, LLC - The blog....
