Some of our members were in the right place at the right time, skilled, and lucky enough to have captured a great image of the eclipse. A few of them were also gracious enough to share those images with those less fortunate. These are their images. Thank you all.
These images may be used by other members to meet the second set of data required for the Solar Eclipse 2017 Special Observing Award. You may need to do some enhancing to be able to see the fainter stars. You will also then need to determine the deflection of the light from those closest to the sun.
1. Image by Rob Ratkowski. Captured on August 21, 2017 at 11:44:12 AM, from near Casper, WY, 42º 44.071′ N and 105º 36.648′ W, using a Nikon D810 camera (36.6mpixals) w/ a Nikon 300mm F4 attached. Download the image here.
2. Image by Jame McEuin.Captured on August 21, 2017 at 1:23 PM CDT, from Benton, KY. 36º 53’ 48.05419” N and 88º 13’ 32.08019” W, using a T5i with 75-300 zoom lens set at about 200mm fl. Download the image here.
3. Image taken by Corrie Ann Delgado. Captured on August 21, 2017 at 13:29:42 CDT near Center Hill Dam in TN. 36º 6′ 0.64″ N and 85º 49′ 35.33″ W, using a point and shoot Canon G16. Download the image here. This image has Mars and a number of stars. This image has been processed by David Collings and the processed image is here.
Processing: What I have done to help enhance the images is to convert to grayscale and use the negative of the images. I then adjust the contrast and brightness to try to bring out the fainter stars. So far, I have not seen a star closer than Regulus. I know that the deviation for Regulus is about a third of an arcsecond, and that is not really enough to accurately measure. My advice is use a more distant object as your control case, and attempt to calculate the deviation for Regulus. Good Luck. – Aaron Clevenson