2023 Annular Eclipse

75% probability of clouds – it wasn’t looking good for this annular eclipse on October 14th. And so it goes in the Adirondacks, you never know what you’re going to get. And being far off center line meant we could only expect to see a partial eclipse anyway – just a bite – not the gorgeous “ring of fire” that would be seen in the south-western part of the country.

But my planned trip to a family outing at Hampton Beach in New Hampshire turned out to be fortuitous with a somewhat better weather forecast there. Hampton Beach is a few hundred miles further away from the eclipse center line, but the net result wasn’t much different than what I’d see at home if the sky cooperated. I grabbed some camera equipment on the way out the door. This and a little luck allowed me to catch some shots before the clouds moved in over the beach (reports from back home indicated complete overcast during the event). With a little post-processing in Siril the setup captured several sunspots to add some texture to the shot.

So yeah, no telescope. Just my Canon T5i camera, tripod, and a rather dubious arrangement of lenses. I used my 55-250 mm zoom lens combined with a 2x focal expander, creating a less-than-sharp 500 mm lens. I decided not to haul along the 8″ SCT telescope and all it’s accoutrements in a car full of family outing stuff. Rather, the camera, lens, and a tripod would have to do.

It was surprisingly tough to find the right manual focus in the bright sunlight. The auto-focus didn’t work with this lens arrangement and all the reflections made it difficult to see the 10x live view screen while adjusting the touchy manual focus ring of the camera lens. I’m not convinced I actually got it as good as it gets. The image in the optical viewfinder looked good, but could not show as much detail as the live view image – which was hard to see. So I had to “wing it”.

And I regretted not having the telescope. That worked great the last time I went solar imaging. Oh well – they say the best telescope is “the one you’ll use”, which is certainly borne out in this case! If it’s too big and bulky to carry around then I guess you need a smaller telescope – or a camera lens.