Small telescopes are those with an aperture of 5" or less. They make perfect tools for viewing and photographing a solar eclipse. Because eclipses only occur over a relatively small area of land, one must often travel great distances to view one. Thus small, portable telescopes with good field tripods that can be carried on airplanes and in cars with minimal difficulties are the best.

When using a small telescope with a camera, a good mount is essential to get good photographs and to enjoy the experience overall. There have been many cases where the tripod was forfeited to allow for packing something else only the render the telescope useless or frustrating to use during the eclipse. You can gamble that you will find a table or some other platform to set up on but in my experience that is not recommended as you will most likely miss out on viewing the eclipse itself.

During totality a small telescope will yield fantastic views and photographs of the inner corona, prominences, and chromosphere. You can see great detail in the prominences and short exposures will yield beautiful pictures of this phenomenon. Using fast film such as ASA 400 or a good digital camera, exposure times should range from 1/500 to ½ second in time. Longer exposures to reveal the outer coronal structures are possible. Longer exposures also bring up tracking problems as the Earth's motion is greatly amplified by the magnification. This problem is solved by using a tracking mount and many smaller telescopes provide the perfect solution with a built in drive.

Computerized mounts provide a nice way to track objects in the sky once properly aligned. During the day light hours only the sun will be visible and some systems require stellar sightings for alignment. You can either set up the night before or accept the initial locations as okay without verifying. When used with photography a computer driven mount will be fine so long as the telescope and camera are well balanced, do not put too much stress on the drive motor, and the exposures are relatively short. Longer exposures are not needed during a total solar eclipse thus field rotation will not be an issue. It is highly recommended that you practice by taking pictures of the moon when it is at about the same altitude in the sky. This exercise should reveal any problems your mounting system could encounter.

When preparing to bring a small telescope for photography purposes, be sure to figure out some way to get in some observing with a moderate power eyepiece as well. My favorite magnification for viewing an eclipse is at 40x to 50x. At that power one can see the corona and prominences all at once and a great amount of detail is visible that you cannot see with binoculars and the naked eye. You will not have much time for this luxury and sharing the experience is almost impossible except during very long eclipses of 4 or more minutes.