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 The cloud forecast at home (NW of San Francisco) looked bad for the lunar eclipse and I decided Joshua Tree NP, in the SW corner of California, looked a lot better. Being quite a bit farther east also meant the moon would be a little higher without so much air in the path, so I headed out for a 2-day drive to this very cosmic location, with dark skies at 4000-5000 ft. All was good until yesterday afternoon when high clouds loomed to the north. I set up, hoping for luck, and got it! The moon was behind some thin clouds for a while but the middle of the eclipse was clear, as far as I could tell. I wanted to get the lowest ISO to get the best details, so I needed to freeze the motion of the dim moon at 600mm. I set up my Astrotrac on lunar tracking mode, with the Canon 600 mm II and the 7D Mk II. It wasn’t dark enough to do the requisite polar alignment so I had to use my iPhone compass to aim the tracking axis north. After using the compass successfully for years, and many times yesterday to find where the moon would be from various locations, it started doing very strange things just as I was aligning. (Desert heat got to it??) Powered the phone off and back on and it worked long enough to align, then went crazy again. But tracking was fortunately very good. Don’t know if it shows here but the stars are very slightly elongated due to the difference in the motion of the moon, which I was tracking, and the stars. This is a composite of two exposures due to the brightness gradient across the moon. (This eclipse was deeper in the earth’s shadow than most, so this one was pretty easy.) The moon was dim enough that the stars showed beautifully. I had the best results at ISO 800, 1 to 4 sec exposures at f/4, near mid-eclipse. I was hoping to be able to get down to ISO 100, but a breeze made the shorter exposures sharper. It is so cool to watch the skies get dark in a lunar eclipse and all the stars come out as they do in a new moon. |
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by andre paul
on Mon Sep 28, 2015 11:04 pm
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