After careful consideration, we are excited to announce the winner of our 2024 Great American Eclipse Contest. The winning image selected was taken by Dan Folz, who caught this superb shot of totality with his SVX102T. Congratulations Dan! This contest was a true community project. Two highly skilled imagers agreed to serve as final judges of the contest, Tony Hallas and Jon Talbot. Both selected Dan's image even though we had some really amazing submissions. Thank you all for submitting your wonderful shots. We are pleased to know that so many of you got to witness the eclipse.

According to Dan: "Greetings to all at Stellarvue! A truly breathtaking eclipse to see, experience and photograph. One of the most gratifying things was my oldest son was able to travel with me to see it (his first)! Everything performed perfectly!

Details:

• All images were taken with my SVX102T telescope.
• No filters used during totality.
• No field flattener used.
• Takahashi EM-10 equatorial mount (solar tracking rate) on top of a carbon fiber tripod.
• Nikon D500 camera with a wireless release (1.53 crop factor).
• Effective focal length 1092mm.
• Several sets of bracketed exposures were taken.
• The image presented here was created from a stack of 12 exposures from 1/8000s to 1/4s in one stop increments at ISO 200.

Location data:

• 38° 19’ 23” N; 89° 11’ 02” W; a nice small park in Ashley, IL.