Solar Eclipse 2017: The Great American Eclipse  -  Gear

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Our strategy for observing the eclipse is to keep track of it visually, while photographing and documenting the eclipse with a variety of telescopes and cameras.  There are two ways to observe the sun through a telescope - both require blocking filters to protect your eyes from permanent damage.  The standard method utilizes a "white light" filter, which literally blocks most of the white light (as well as all of the infrared and UV).  White light filters produce views of the sun like the ones I took yesterday:

The full solar disk through a white light filter.

A close-up of the sun spot group working its way across the solar surface - it should be visible on Monday as well.

We have two telescopes with white light filters.  Our primary visual scope will be a 4.5" Meade ETX125 Maksutov Cassegrain using a Badder filter (not shown):

I'll be using my 8" Meade LX200 Schmidt Cassegrain with a Thousand Oaks Mylar filter to photograph the eclipse with my Nikon D5500 DSLR:

I also have a pair of 10X50 Binoculars with Meade white light filters and a few pairs of eclipse glasses to hand out to people so they don't touch my nice gear.

Another type of telescope filter only allows a narrow band of Hydrogen Alpha light pass through.  These are called Hydrogen Alpha filters and usually come with a dedicated scope for solar viewing exclusively.  The filters have to be fine tuned and are a little tricky to use.  However, when you get used to them, you can achieve spectacular views of the sun's hydrogen "atmosphere."

The sun in Hydrogen Alpha bandwidth - courtesy of NASA's SOHO scope.  Sunspots appear white and solar flares can be seen.

We have two Hydrogen Alpha scopes, but one is currently out of commission.  Originally, we planned to use my Lunt LS50tHA 50mm scope for photography and my dad's Coronado Solarmax II 60mm scope for visual observation.  Unfortunately, the Solarmax II has developed some rust in the eyepiece blocking filter and isn't producing acceptable images.  We'll therefor use my Lunt for both photographs and visual observation.  the camera I'm using is a ZWO ASI178MC color CMOS camera.  It connects to my computer and projects a live image while I capture images.  Later the images are processed using Astrostacking software.

For photographing the sun during totality, we'll be using my dad's Nikon D7000 DLSR with a Nikkor 55-200mm zoom lens.  We'll mount it on a Slik tripod with a heavy duty mount to minimize shake.  We'll use a technique called HDR to capture shots of the corona (weather permitting).

Finally, I'm going to try to do a timelapse movie with my GoPro Hero 5 Black Edition.  I'll set it to take a picture every 5 seconds for about an hour.  Two iPhones will round out our imaging systems.

Dad looking through the Solarmax II, me the Meade LX200.  To my right is the Lunt 50mm.