Below are a couple of my shots: two stills (from the day before the eclipse), and a movie + timelapse (from the eclipse itself). We had some high clouds the morning of the eclipse, so the H-alpha features were pretty muted until when the eclipse started.
A few notes on planning:
- During the Balloon Fiesta's "Mass Ascension," 50+ balloons take off at 7 AM, and are mostly down by 9 AM. So I knew from the start that the odds were low of actually getting a balloon during the eclipse itself, which started at 9:15 AM local time.
- The morning before the eclipse, we drove around Albuquerque to scout locations. I wanted to be far enough back from the launch site. Too close and the balloons would block the whole sun; too far and they'd be too small (and perhaps too low as well). Also to take in consideration were the winds.
- We ended up about a mile back from the launch site on Friday, and moved further out to two miles away on eclipse day. Both sites were empty lots / roadsides -- not scenic but it was all about lines-of-sight to the sky. By coincidence it turned out we were within 100 meters of the centerline for the eclipse -- didn't really matter for this, but fun to know.
- I've previously been involved number of stellar occultation observations, where I set up a telescope to be on the right lon & lat, and waited for an asteroid to pass in front of a distant star. That usually involves a lot of location-scouting, and asking for permission from local land-owners, and that set up me well here.
Lunt 80mm SS + ZWO 1600MM + SolarQuest mount. Processing in Lightroom, plus a python script to I wrote to re-center the sun.
-Hankk
Balloon + Sun in Ha, Albuquerque, Oct 2023 on Flickr
Balloon + Sun in Ha on Flickr
Annular Eclipse + Hot Air Balloons Timelapse, H-alpha, October 2023, on Flickr
