Eclipse

The day started off all cloudy, but the clouds got less dense, and then when the eclipse in our front yard reached totality, we had a big break in the clouds.

The first picture has a sunspot in the middle. In the totality picture, slightly to the right of the bottom of the sun in the totality picture there is a hint of a reddish prominence which in my 8" telescope had lovely structure. A quick measurement from the photo shows that the prominence is about seven times the size of the earth.

Lunar eclipse

I stayed up to watch the lunar eclipse.  It was quite nice.  I took the kids out for the grand finale.

I also took a whole bunch of photos.  I'll be editing them a bit more and trying to write some script to align the frames better (and maybe even de-rotating?), but for now, here is the set.  The animation jumpy because I wasn't taking pictures all the time--some of the time I was indoors watching Starship Exeter.  I used a perl script and ImageMagick to animate the photos, using the exif time stamps and speeding up by a factor of 400.  Some of the shadows are odd--I've had trouble with shadows of clouds, branches and internal telescope structures.  I'll eventually try to clean up the photos and remove the bad ones.

I suppose one of the remarkable things about an eclipse is that one is used to astronomical views changing much more slowly.  The video covers a period of about an hour.