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.
