The total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024 happened to cross over my home province of Prince Edward Island - a once in a lifetime opportunity! What was even more amazing is that we had a perfectly clear day in what is typically a very overcast month on PEI. Cloudy skies are experienced almost 70% of the time in early April.
We packed the gear up at 10:30am and drove to the far west end, North Cape, where near maximum totality would be experienced. The air was warm for April but the cool waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence brought in a frigid wind chill along with cloud, fog, and mist. Things ultimately cleared there later in the day, but we did not want to risk it and left to find an alternate location. We ended up at the end of a dirt road in the corner of a potato field just west of Tignish in the community of Peterville. There was a cool breeze, but the skies looked more promising there.
We had the Vaonis Stellina with us as well as my Orion 130mm APO Refractor mounted on my old CGE Pro mount. The Stellina had just received a firmware upgrade to enable a new "Eclipse Mode" from Vaonis, but I hadn't had time to review the documentation, so wasn't exactly sure what to expect.
The Stellina was being bumped around in the wind, resulting in malformed images, so we constructed a wind shield using wooden stakes and vapour barrier.. It worked pretty well, but I still ended up throwing away about 10% of the images.
The CGE Pro took a while to polar align and get working with the laptop. The alignment wasn't perfect but good enough that we could keep the sun on the sensor with a few clicks of the mouse every minute or so. We used a ZWO ASI174MC camera with FireCapture.
There was some cloud cover leading up to the start of the eclipse, but the skies cleared nicely just in time. The sky was completely clear up to and during totality!
The results from the 130mm Refractor and ASI174MC were very good. I made two mistakes, however. First, I was overly cautious with the solar filter and didn't remove it soon enough to capture the Diamond Ring Effect. And in the heat of the moment, I forgot to reduce the exposure length after removing the filter, causing the details of the prominences to be overexposed. Next time...
Above is my best 30s capture during totality. Below are composites that include both totality and the various stages of the eclipse pre- and post-totality.
As stated above, we did not manage to capture the Diamond Ring Effect...or at least in a useable form...
In the following images, many artistic liberties were taken to manufacture the effect from the data we did manage to capture. Thank you Photoshop!
