Scope Diagram Astrocamera.Net - Astrophotography by Dave Kodama  

Partial Solar Eclipse - 23 Oct. 2014


I used my "standard" portable equipment setup for this eclipse - 4" Borg refractor, equatorial mount, and home-made wooden tripod. Normally I use a lighter mount, but since I travelled by car this time, I used my Losmandy GM8 equatorial mount (non-go-to version). This allowed me to use a Hutech Hinode solar autoguider, which eliminated any need to tweak the centering of the sun during the eclipse sequence.

In the images below, the Hinode solar guider (a prototype version) is the silver box on top of the scope, next to a "red-dot" finder used for night photography. The solar filter is a Thousand Oaks photographic density solar filter.

Because I travelled by car for this trip, I brought my Losmandy GM8 (non-go-to) equatorial mount. The mount was roughly aligned using the sides of the nearby NSO building as a reference and left at the sidereal tracking rate since the autoguider was being used. Both the mount and autoguider were powered from a DC 12V lead-acid gel battery.

equipment setup

Images were shot on a Nikon D600 full-frame DSLR attached to the Borg 100ED refractor with a 2x teleconverter for a focal length of 1280mm. Exposures were 1/2000 sec. at ISO 200. The camera's internal intervalometer was used to take a shot once per minute.

equipment setup