I hope you have a good evening for viewing! What size telescope do you have?
I retired and it was great to be able to wake up at 2:30 and decide to just go out and see the stars. (And listen to owls calling back and forth.)
Getting back to you on the eclipse - I will be using a Canon 500 mm f/4 lens on a 32 mpx crop sensor’ed camera. I am considering putting a 1.4X teleconverter on the lens, which would make it 700 mm but only f/5.6. With a little more practice, I think this tracking mount will allow me to go with the longer, but slower lens option.
The main reason that I want to do this is that the last 2 eclipses I’ve photographed, I really had to crank up the ISO (think of it as amplifying the light that the sensor captures) which results in a lot of image noise. In order to crush the noise and clean up the image, some detail is lost. The tracking allows me to take a longer time exposure without the issue of motion blur (you may or may not be surprised at how visible such movement is, even for only a second, with higher magnification lenses).
So it’s not a telescope, but a big telephoto lens. The diameter of the entrance optic is about 125 mm, which would make it around a 5 inch diameter.
Of course, it is designed for photography, so no live view will be available other than what the camera picks up.
This is my inner geek screaming to get out. Q would undoubtedly approve.