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.

Today's sunspots

Today I was testing the solar filter I got for the eclipse. (300mm f/5.6, cropped).

Partial eclipse

Handheld, through welder's glass

Hanheld, through eclipse glasses, with a whiff of sunspots (I'll have to get proper solar film for total eclipse photography this spring)

Transit of Mercury

I'm taking a break from grading. See small dot right and up of center. Larger and more diffuse dot left of center is a sunspot.

Transit of Venus

Here are some photos over the first 45 minutes or so. They are in sequence, but not evenly spaced in time.

This is from my 8" F/4.5 scope, stopped down to about 3", with photo taken hand-held with my Canon G7 camera off the projection funnel.

Here is the last photo in a larger size.  The sunspots were very nicely visible in the funnel (I counted about 15), and I could even see two without a telescope in the #14 welder's glass.  The photo doesn't do justice to the sunspots, especially the nice bright area that was just barely visible at the bottom of the disc.

Eclipse

Here in central Texas, the sun set before the eclipse hit maximum.  But we had some lovely views of the moon gobbling up sunspots as the sun was setting over the lake.  Photos are taken by a Canon G7 camera, using a modified version of the sun funnel for projection.  The scope is an 8" F/4.5.  For the first photo it was stopped down to about 3".  The second photo I think used the full aperture.

And for reference, here's the sun in the afternoon, before the eclipse: