March 4th, 2007
There was an eclipse of the moon today. Supposedly at 1am, but it turns out Darlene was reading a news report from South Africa so the time zone was a bit off. I did get some pictures of a full moon, though.
Here's a hand-held shot with the normal lens. A light cloud cover, but
no earthly shadow.
Here we're "zoomed in".
This is with the "super telephoto" (Meade ETX-90).
We'll try again on August 28th when the next eclipse is actually visable
at our longitude (03:37 PDT).
April 4th, 2007
The moon passed over on Passover. Here it is setting in the morning.
It would appear that it's difficult to get a good focus with that much
atmosphere in the way. It looks pretty lumpy around the edges.
The trees here are the ones on the top of the ridge in this picture
of Kyeno.
August 28th, 2007, 12:45 am
Okay, our camera is set up and ready to go. The news said we'll have an eclipse at 3:37am.
We've got work tomorrow so we'll head to bed and set the alarm
to get up at 3am.
August 28th, 2007, 3:06 am
Oh nooooo!! We wanted to catch the shadow of the earth as it started occluding the moon, not a full eclipse. We should have gotten up at 2am. Here it's just a dark moon.
So dark, in fact, that the exposure time is long enough that the moon
moves too far while we're waiting for the exposure.
Fortunately our tripod is motorized and we can set it up so it tracks
the moon's position during the exposure.
Unfortunately with the T-mount on the back of the telescope, the camera
sticks out too far for the telescope to point very high in the sky. To
get these pictures I had to retract the back leg of the tripod so the
telescope mount is no longer level. I don't think I can get it to
track the moon when it's set up that way.
Fortunately there's another total eclipse that starts on February
20th at 5:43 PM and lasts until 9pm. It should be pretty low on
the horizon for the first part of that and we've got some time to
remind ourselves on how that motorized tripod works.
Maybe we can pass these off as pictures of Mars in the meantime.
February 20th, 2008, ~8:30pm PST
The weather behaved for tonight's eclipse.
Unfortunately, with the low level of light detected by the camera,
it decided to over-expose the pictures. Also, the exposure time,
.6 seconds here, might be long enough for the moon to have moved
enough to blur things. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to
figure out whether the motorized tripod would work.
At 9pm enough of the moon is visable to speed up the auto-shutter speed.
This is 1/50th of a second and looks much better. For the next eclipse
in December of 2010 we'll try using the fixed shutter speed.