October 14th Annular Eclipse as Viewed From Dallas

Did you get a chance to see the eclipse yesterday? Even though it was only a partial eclipse for us here in Dallas, Texas, it was still spectacular!

As lots of folks at the State Fair of Texas found, it's pretty amazing how easy it is to see what's going on (watching with appropriate eye protection, of course). Given that it isn't safe to look directly at the Sun and we may only even try during an eclipse, it's easy to forget that the Sun is about the same size in the sky as the Moon. That, of course, is why a total solar eclipse like the one next April is even possible. But it also means that putting on a pair of eclipse glasses and looking up yesterday during the eclipse, the piece of the Sun blocked out by the Moon was clearly obvious even without magnification. What about the view through a telescope? 

Here is a view from about an hour into the eclipse taken with my equipment which has an effective focal length of 714mm, resulting in a 12.38X view. At this level of magnification, besides the impact of the Moon being in the way you can also make out some of the many active sunspots. Click on the image to see full-size.

Seeing a point in time view of the eclipse is great but to show the changes over the course of the full eclipse, I put together this view containing a subset of all the images I shot to create the eclipse timelapse of my earlier post. These are each about a half-hour apart. 

When you click on this image to see it full-size, you'll also see another version labeled with the times throughout the eclipse when these were taken.