The Annular Solar Eclipse 20Th May 2012

[Jay-qu]

As I'm sure everyone was aware, on Sunday part of the western coast of the united states got to experience an annular eclipse - which was also my first eclipse :)

 

We drove a few hours north to extend 'annularity' to a full 2 minutes. Giving me just enough time to setup - and do a rough align (need to practice more day aligning :\ ). Fortunately I got lucky and the scope only required a nudge every 10 mins or so. With the eclipse finishing at Sunset, the diminishing light meant I had to extend the exposure from about 1/640 to 1/80 and double the ISO... Unfortunately this means the colours change a little throughout the video, as I haven't got the time to spend tweaking the ~1000 RAWs manually (if anyone knows of program that may help with this please let me know!).

 

Equipment used:

Canon 500D

Skywatcher 100ED

Celestron CG5 mount

Thousand Oaks type 2+ white light solar filter

Intervalometer

 

Processed the RAW's in lightroom, wrote a script for mathematica to align the frames and pieced it together with ffmpeg:

 

Below I have attached my favourite frame, thanks for looking!

J