I purchased a Vaonis Hestia Telescope that works with your phone’s camera through a Kickstarter project. I purchased the telescope way back in the Fall and have, with everyone else in North America, been waiting for it to ship before the Solar Eclipse. I was pleasantly surprised when it showed up on my doorstep the Thursday before the eclipse. However, due to scheduling conflicts, clouds and storms, I didn’t have much time to play with the telescope before the big event on Monday, April 8.
The day was lovely. However, clouds moved about blocking the sun here and there during the eclipse’s duration. Luckily, the clouds moved away just before totality, so I was able to get some unobstructed photos of totality. You can tell which photos I took when the sky was clear around the sun, and when it was enmeshed with clouds. It was easier to see the sun’s flares around the corona when there was a bit of cloud cover.
A few of the farther away totality photos were taken with my DSLR using a standard zoom lens. I think they look quite good.
It was also difficult to keep the Gravity App settings the same because I had to keep changing the exposure and ISO from manual to auto because when the clouds moved over the sun, it was difficult to find it; the auto exposure made the sun brighter to find, but I ran into overexposure problems. If I had this telescope during the 2017 eclipse, I could have kept the settings on manual because the skies were crystal clear.
Even though, it was a cool experience and I’m excited to play with my Hestia telescope more with the sun, moon and stars.
