April 2024 Eclipse

The August 2017 eclipse passed directly over my grandparent's house, west of Saint Louis, which made figuring out where to watch it from easy. Totality for this one was a bit further away, but still within a day's drive, and a friend of mine had never seen an eclipse before. I eventually settled on "Somewhere south of Thayer, Missouri", with how south depending on the time and where I could find somewhere to park and set up my telescope. That ended up being some little dirt lot in Arkansas between US-63 and some dirt road about 8 miles south of Thayer. When I got there there was just an ARDOT truck with someone taking their lunch break. More people pulled into the lot and parked after I set up my telescope, I guess they figured that the nerd with the telescope pointed at the sun knows something.

The only thing I wish I could have changed with the photos would be a slightly wider field of view. But I would have needed a full frame camera (Some day...) or a reducer for the scope, which I still don't have one, and this was long before I even pondered a different tripod for the telescope, and the stock mount on the Nexstar 127SLT is wobbly enough with the camera attached directly to the back of the scope. It would have been nice to get the whole corona in one shot.