We arrived at Vermilion OH on Saturday, late afternoon, to our rental house which had a great backyard for viewing the eclipse.
Equipment was set up and tested on Sunday. I had written a script for APT to automatically run the series of exposures varying the duration based on time in order to capture Bailey's Beads and maybe the Diamond Ring. Weather forecast was promising only high level clouds during the event.
Monday morning the scope/equipment was set up outside and tested one more time. The script would require me to start it precisely at 15:12:15 in order to maintain the order of exposures. I spent the partial phase time making sure the focus was good. After capturing a number of photos of the partial phase the time of second contact (start of the total phase) was getting close.
At precisely 15:12:15 I pressed the start button to run the script. Nothing. I pressed it again. Still, nothing! I then realized that I was still in Live-Mode (which prevents the script from running). I quickly turned off Live-Mode, started the script and ran back to the telescope to remove the filter. I knew that getting the Diamond Ring and Bailey's Beads was probably not going to happen as the script was now off-sequence. But I didn't want to miss out on at least seeing them with the naked eye.
Although the clouds probably masked the outer corona as it didn't appear to extend very far, the view of the coronal ring with all those red prominences was a sight to see. The ring was bright. Brighter than the one during the 2017 eclipse. And the prominence at the bottom of the sun was absolutely stunning. It almost looked like a blazing red fire igniting the base of the moon.
As expected, initial review of the photos showed a good number of images capturing the total phase in various durations but only one photo got a hint of Bailey's Beads. I'll take it! I will spend the next few days processing the images. Probably not surprising was the fact that the view through binoculars (and naked eye) seemed crisper and more colorful than the photos - at least, the unprocessed ones. Total solar eclipses are definitely meant to be seen live!
Here is a single, unprocessed photo of the eclipse. All images were taken with my William Optics GT102 telescope and Canon 50D camera mounted on an iOptron eq30 Pro.
Great picture
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