Partial Solar Eclipse from Dayton, despite the clouds and rain.
My Patience & Perseverance paid off!!!
Due to other commitments I did not travel to center-line for this Annular Eclipse…but it didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try to get the partial from home.
I started prepping for the Partial eclipse in my backyard in Dayton about 9:00am this morning, despite the dismal forecast.
I took down my C-11 scope and put my Lunt H-Alpha scope on the MyT mount in the backyard.

I noticed that my neighbor’s tree was blocking the Sun, but I figured in about an hour the Sun would rise high enough to clear the tree.
Luckily by then I managed to get the camera focused on the Sun through some of these large 4 minute gaps in the clouds, I finally got the camera focused and solar tracking locked in by about 10:30am.

Now the waiting game!!! waiting for a sucker hole…Knowing that I will start to see first contact around 11:45am …but only if the gaps in the clouds stayed large
…well go figure…
unfortunately the gaps started getting smaller and far and few between, so I sat with patience and focused on the mission to click that capture button the moment I see the Sun peaking through the thinner clouds. After sitting there and capturing diligently I managed to get 11 good SER captures varying from 3 seconds to 1 minute during the event.
I had to stop at 1:40pm when the rain started and I had to close the dome.
Most of the time I could not even see the Sun’s disk on the PC monitor, until the clouds thinned occasionally, I would raise the camera gain up to help me see it on the monitor better.

A really interesting thing that I noticed while imaging this eclipse during heavy cloud cover was…
I have Solar Panels on my backyard Observatory, and they run fans to cool the observatory, the fans would get louder and faster as the panels get more sunlight,
so as we got small breaks or thinner clouds, I would hear the fans get faster and louder, which cued me to click the capture button as the sun was starting to appear through thinner clouds, and the image would appear on the Computer Screen.

Initially I had trouble stacking the SER video images in Registax6, and Autostakkert3 due to the clouds moving so fast across the frames,
So I switched over to Astrosurface for processing so I could lock in on the Sun’s disk for global stacking, regardless of what the fast moving clouds were doing.
It locked it in and stacked it nice enough for me to post the image. I used 83 good frames from the original 236 SER images file.
It was a little noisy but that was to be expected with such a low amount of frames and shooting through clouds.
I’m so glad I stuck with it despite the conditions, I just kept telling the clouds….you %$#^&*# Resistance is Futile!
I’m happy with the capture!

Capture details:
Lunt 60mm/50F Hydrogen Alpha Solar Telescope, QHY5IIL Cmos Camera, Fire-Capture Software, Sun HA, 1.0ms exposure, Gain 8, 16.5 sec SER file,
Captured from my backyard Observatory on 10-14-2023 16:18 UTC(12:18 Local time).

Best Regards,
John Chumack
www.galacticimages.com