2023 Annular Eclipse

So, the 2023 annular eclipse has come and gone. I have long harbored interest in astronomy, and by extension, astrophotography. Alas, due to a number of frustrations my efforts have dwindled almost nil over the past decade. The coming double-whammy of the anular eclipse and total solar eclipse sparked a stirring of ambition in me, and I resolved to photograph both. As New Braunfels is outside the zone of totality for both eclipses, I had to travel west to experience the full effect. Unsure of how many people would turn out for this thing (many otherwise free public parks were charging admission!) I hit upon setting up my viewing in a somewhat obscure picnic area on Interstate 10 between Boerne and Comfort. Sure enough, when I arrived shortly before 10 a.m. on Oct. 14, the picnic area was mostly deserted save for a handful of truckers pulled over to grab a bit of sleep.

I quickly staked out my preferred site and set up. For those intersted in the techical aspects, I used a Meade 645 Newtonian telescope with a basic, worm-screw tracking drive. I plugged the drive into a inverter connected to a deep-cycle marine battery for power. I rough aligned the tracking mount using a compass to determine north. Over the front of the scope I attached a filter I constructed using Baader Planetarium AstroSolar Safety Film--the same setup I used to photograph the transit of Venus a decade ago. The camera I used is a Rebet T3i modified for astrophotography. Camera settings were 100 ISO with a shutter speed of 1/2000. Aperture is f/5 set by the telescope. Focus was manual and seeing (turbulence in the atmosphere) was only fair, hampering my efforts to get really detailed images. To the camera I attached a Neewer remote programmed to trigger the camera once every 20 seconds, resulting in three photographs per minute.

The clouds stayed mostly away. I managed to capture some sunspots in my images but beyond that there was almost no detail for my simple setup to capture. In hindsight, I did better with focusing than I thought at the time. I'll be better prepared what to expect next April for the total eclipse. Ultimately, I ended up with 566 photos, start to finish. I'm working on a detailed edit of a selection of them, but here's a sampling with a quick bit of processing:

As i said, the picnic area was mostly deserted when I set up but it didn't stay that way for long. By peak eclipse I'd been joined by dozens of folks who pulled off the highway to watch. One guy from Houston had a nice little Celestron scope he was shooting the eclipse with--he hadn't set up any alignment but was using the electronic controls to slew the scope and manually track the sun. Another guy brought his daughter all the way from New Jersey(!) to see the spectacle--they'd originally planned to go to Hondo, but early morning weather reports indicated cloudy skies so they decided to head to Kerrville instead. Unfortunately the rental agency botched their reservation and they almost missed the show. We had a good talk and he took selfies with myself and the Houston astronomer before rushing back to San Antonio to catch a departing flight. Another couple sat on the picnic tables behind me and chatted amiably during the event. Once the "ring of fire" broke and the moon began to uncover the sun the crowd dissipated quickly. Only myself and the Celestron guy from Houston stuck around to the very end.

All in all, I quite enjoyed the experience. I've only experienced partial solar eclipses before and had never gone into any with purpose. I'd planned my strategy, packed my car the night before and everything went as planned--whick is unheared of for me. I learned some valuable lessons this outing and am hopeful that I will be better prepared for the total eclipse in April of 2024. We shall see.

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My luck is EPIC!

Unfortunately, that epic luck is all bad, at least where it comes to astronomy. The rest of my life, I figure I'm at worst break even, if not somewhat ahead overall. But when it comes to astronomy? Forget it. I'm like Charlie Brown trying to kick that football.

A telescope mirror was delivered by FedEx today, a replacement for my old 6" f/5 mirror that was badly chipped and rendered useless back in April. I've gone the whole summer observing season without a working telescope, a painful ordeal I will expand on more fully in a future post. But today I was getting a replacement, perhaps not as good as the mirror I lost, but one that will allow me to resume backyard astronomy. Yay!

Except said package was not on the front porch as had been indicated. The Wife looked all around the front of our house where it might've been left. Nothing. Then she checked the neighbors'. Again, nothing. Seriously verging on a personal meltdown over the senseless unfairness of the universe, I called in a missing package report to FedEx.

FedEx wanted me to check again. Particularly around the car washing supplies, because the delivery driver made sure to leave it with the car washing supplies.

Which is very interesting, because we have no car-washing supplies at our house, outside, inside or otherwise. If you've seen my car, you would understand this.

So, The Wife set out into the neighborhood again, looking for homes with car washing supplies out front. And she found one, down the street. The house didn't look like ours. The address wasn't similar to ours. Yet this is the house the driver decided to leave the package at. The Wife retrieved it, and I let FedEx know we've located their lost delivery.

The Wife hasn't opened it, though. The last time I opened a shipping container with a telescope mirror in it, little broken pieces of shattered glass came out. At this point, I'm conditioned to expect the worst. Will find out this evening when I get home if my (bad) luck holds.

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