Just posted here - the video has chapter markings so you can skip to points of interest.
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Damn, that was great!! Thanks so much!
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Thanks @whitacre.rick - glad you enjoyed it!
I missed the live version, but watching this just paid off! I will be tracking with one camera but manually targeting a different camera during totality. A ball head is difficult to use for that, and my old pan-tilt head really isn’t robust enough for this. But Michael’s suggestion of a gimbal clicked a light bulb in my head. I do have a [Sidewinder] Sidekick, and that should work just as well. I’ll try it out next time we have sun here! Thanks, Stephen, and Michael!
Dave
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This thing looks funny, but it works. Just FYI.
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That’s quite ingenious, actually!
Dave
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Thanks! I appreciate that.
Rick (and anyone else interested) your idea for a manual tracker intrigued me enough that I looked into cobbling together my own version. I saw that I could simplify it by eliminating the L-bracket and just attaching the second (upper) ball head directly to the clamp on a pan-tilt head that I had. I can tilt the lower head to the correct polar angle for my latitude, and then the upper head will rotate along the RA axis just like any equatorial mount. I still have to adjust the declination by using the ball (more on that below), but once I have found the right dec (assuming good polar alignment) it stays in the frame.
Note that because the face of the lower pan head clamp is facing north, it needs to be adjusted to the complement of the polar angle, so that the axis of the upper ball head points toward Polaris. So since I live at 39.5 degrees latitude, I use a digital angle gauge to adjust the face of the clamp to 50.5 degrees (it was a little off in the picture).
To find north I have an aluminum slide that I put in the lower clamp (when leveled) and then use a magnetic compass or my phone to align the lower head to N. then I can adjust the tilt of the head to the right angle.
I have tested this with my 800 mm on the sun, and it is working well, and is surprisingly stable. To facilitate adjustment of the declination, I position the ball so that the base of the camera is tangential to the arc of right ascension. That way the declination is always perpendicular to the RA arc, and up/down in the camera frame. So if I do need to make a slight adjustment in dec, I only need to move it in that axis. To make this a little easier, I have a cheap but sturdy pan/tilt head (with rotating base) coming from B&H, so I don’t have to fight the ball tending to move sideways.
I still have some testing and tweaking to do, but I am leaning toward using this for my second camera during the eclipse. Thanks for the idea!
Dave
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Great adaptation!! I love it! Good luck with it. BTW, since the write-up I sent you, I have converted to using the SunSeeker app and its gyro compass mode for setting Azimuth of the mount. It is very, very accurate. Here is a write-up and links to a couple of videos I did on using it: Daytime Polar Alignment using the Sun Seeker App for Smartphones - Google Docs