I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my car as I type this, headed back to Las Vegas. We left Arkansas at 4am CDT and are going to do the full 21hr drive back non stop except for gas, food and bathrooms. Don't worry, rotating drivers every stop and getting plenty of naps along the way. We should get home around midnight PDT.
We had so much going on including a livestream from Dr. Clay Sherrod's observatory.
Here's a link if you want to watch the replay, just jump to the good stuff, the countdown clock helps!
https://www.youtube.com/live/9eFqfQzWdj ... Xz_NEztI4q
Telescopes in two observatories plus I had two scopes and mounts running, a 180° video camera rolling during Totality and a
Amazingly, everything seemed to work with only one minor hiccup. My iOptron CEM70EC with my 152mm 1220mmfl rig worked absolutely flawless and fully automated during the entire eclipse, capturing 50 frame SER files took about 13 seconds with a 1 second pause between recordings in SharpCapPro, I basically have the entire eclipse on extremely high res video. Double checking polar alignment on Friday and Saturday night confirmed alignment and remembering to switch to solar tracking mode instead of siderial mode meant the image was virtually rock solid with almost zero drift.
My "wide-angle" rig was a Canon 5D with a Canon 600mm F4 lens automated by Eclipse Orchestrator. E.O. ran flawlessly but at some point the mount must have been bumped because my image was drifting really bad. Fortunately it was caught early on and I just had to keep re-entering it every 5 minutes or so. I set a special alarm for one minute prior to totality to move it so it would drift through the center of the frame at mid totality.
I glanced only very briefly at the 14mm timelapse images and think I'll be able to edit a cool sequence from that data.
The 180° cam hasn't even been previewed so I am hoping it turned out as well as the clip from 2017's eclipse.
Overall it was a spectacular event for us, almost eclipsed by the southern hospitality shown by Dr Clay and his wife, Patsy.
