Saturday night was a mostly good night. Dry, no wind, not excessively cold yet. The Moon was brighter that I wanted but what are you going to do?
I decided on shooting the Helix Nebula though it was fairly close to the Moon. The image is made from 132 one minute subs shot with my 11″ SCT at f/1.9 with an NBZ filter. The filter blocked most of the moonlight.
While my “main” camera was shooting at 300mm to get a closeup, my other camera was shooting wide angle (18mm). You may have seen the video produced from the main camera. Here I set the camera on a tripod and shot one picture every five minutes.
This one was far easier to process than the video. Click the image for a larger view.
This is not the first annular eclipse video you’ve seen or the best, but it’s mine. Shot from Midland, TX Saturday October 14, 2023. My son, Jack, and I drove down Friday and met my friends Carl & Darcy where we all set up in a small city park. We did not go unnoticed and attracted a small crowd of about 30 people who stayed for most of the eclipse. We all had a great time.
Near the start of annularity, I noticed that the shadows of my fingers looked weird. Like they were illuminated by two point sources, because in a way they were. It was noticeably darker during annularity.
Also, Darcy told us to look for Venus and about 10 minutes before annularity we could make it out and that became easy during annularity.
In the run up to annularity and after, it’s one image per minute. During annularity it was one image every five seconds. That is why it slowed down in the middle. Shot with a Canon 800D and 300mm zoom.
After it was over, we packed up and had some lunch and then drove home. The trip home was much easier and we arrived at 12:06AM Sunday morning.
