I set up the ETX with solar filter, it tracks pretty well (I polar aligned it with a compass.), and the Celestron anti vibration pads do help damp its jitter. We observed the sun from 11:30 AM to about 1:30 PM. I used the Thousand Oaks solar filter. I made a crude cross hair and white backdrop out of a old Avalanche Club pass (shades of the Huntington Blizzard Hockey Team) and taped this to the rings that hold the finder scope. I tried to center the shadow of the cross hair on the card. With this I was able to get the sun into the reflection of the primary one the secondary. With a little playing around I was able to walk the sun to the edge of the secondary. I put in an eyepiece and then walked the sun into the eyepiece's field of view. I used the 26 mm plossyl which gave about 50x and left a nice field of dark around the sun.
The moon seemed to move from top left to top right during the eclipse. There was an interesting group of sunspots near the center of the sun. It had two "fried egg" appearing areas and many smaller scattered dark spots. I got to see this both as it disappeared and as it reappeared. It was interesting to observe the individual spots as they first were gobbled by the moon’s shadow and then to watch them reappear out of the black defect caused by the moon. I guess the moon was grazing the sun sideways during the eclipse. There was another group down at 4 o'clock that never got covered. It consisted of one "fried egg" and several dots. At 7-8 there was a large dark sun spot, this too was not involved by the eclipse.
I thought that it was interesting that the moon was so black, I saw no contrast between it and space. It just left a black circular defect in the sun. I had several neighbors who stopped by for a peak. When the sun moved into the trees I took the set up down.
Picture of the partial solar eclipse of December 25, 2000 at 1:08PM. Image taken at prime focus of an orange tube C-8 on Kodak Gold 400 film by Larry Oyster. The see the rest of Larry’s eclipse photos , follow this link.