Preparing for the June Partial Solar Eclipse 2021

Well it’s been a while, but on Sunday I cracked open the observatory shed roof and started to prepare for the partial solar eclipse on 10th June 2021.

I have decided to image the solar eclipse in white light using a solar filter that I previously made. I shall be using my trusty ASI 120MM-S mono camera, The software I am going to use is FireCapture.

Well it took a bit of remembering what to do software wise, regarding EQMOD toolbox, focusers and using FireCapture. I started getting all the camera attached and then finding the sun and then trying to get focus.

It then dawned on me I probably would not get focus as the camera was too close to the focuser. It then took me a while to hunt for some extension tubes with the correct adaptors and then try again. Finally I managed to get focus but found out the Sun was too large when using the 80mm triplet telescope to fit on the screen/chip.

Back I go indoors to find out what focal reducers I had. I had a 0.8x Williams Optics focal reducer so used that, and then had to get the correct adaptors again to make it all join together.

Now the Sun just fits onto the chip of the ASI120MM-S.

I remembered all the problems of trying to focus and see the actual screen of the computer when the sunny sky is above your head. It was a lot better to go indoors and remotely connect to the observatory PC and view the screen indoors.

But that’s only half the story it was then time to try and work FireCapture. I ended up recording in SER format. Which I don’t like as the video seemed a bit grainy. I shall change to AVI format next time. I brought the video  into the house and used Registax 6 to stack it and then GIMP to add some false colour to the final image.

Here’s the setup I’m going with:

Shown in the images:

• Williams Optics x0.8 Focal Reducer/Flattener
• 2x small extension tubes
• T2 to 1.25″ converter
• ASI 120MM-S camera
• Altair Astro 80mm triplet telescope