Tej Dyal
Lunar Eclipse Sequence - Circular
This is my final play around with my hundreds of haphazard images of varying settings taken throughout the truly awesome Lunar eclipse that graced us on 28th September 2015.
I had travelled to Hastings due to the clearest skies weather forecast. So rented a seafront hotel room with balcony, to capture the 8 hour event through the night. I know forecasts cant be relied on but thankfully, this forecast got it right this time! Clear skies all the way through...what a contrast to my endeavour to capture previous year's partial solar eclipse for which I travelled to Eastbourne and remoted a telescope in London as backup...only for the whole event to be washed out with 100% cloud cover in nearly the whole of England. The hotel balcony provided a great view of the Lunar Eclipse as I watched our moon turn slowly redder and redder. What an amazing sight.
For this sequence, I faced a slight problem. I had no end point when the eclipse finished (due to my hotel balcony view in Hastings just clipping the end part of the eclipse. I didnt want to do this outside for fear of a few drunks around I saw out on the street that night! But my balcony view was good enough for my to have a near complete sequence. How to present it without that final full moon emergence, though? Well, as you can see, my solution was to sequence it as a circle in which it wraps around back to the full moon that was taken just before the eclipse. As a bonus, I did not have to rotate the images as this was automatically rotating due to my tracking mount being an Alt-Az (Altitude-Azimuth) which naturally rotates the view over time.
The image in the centre is of the peak totality.
My selections of exposures is not perfect but this is the very first time I have done an image sequence and I am very happy with what I have done here as my first time.
I had so many images of different ISOs and shutterspeed exposure settings at every stage so I was able to pick and choose to give this mosaic the smoothest consistent transition of tones I could get.
This has been such an enjoyable endeavour and experience especially of the Lunar Eclipse itself.
Capture and processing information:
Location: Hastings, from the balcony of a room rented for one night at Lindum Hotel overlooking the sea.
Camera: Canon 1100D
Telescope: 80mm Equinox APO refractor
Mount: Nexstar 8se Goto
ISO: 100 for the early stages, then 400 for later blood moon stages.
Exposures: varied from 1/500 early stages to 2 seconds later stages then back down to 1/500 on the shadow exit stages.
Assembled and post processed with Camera Raw and Photoshop.
Lunar Eclipse Sequence - Circular
This is my final play around with my hundreds of haphazard images of varying settings taken throughout the truly awesome Lunar eclipse that graced us on 28th September 2015.
I had travelled to Hastings due to the clearest skies weather forecast. So rented a seafront hotel room with balcony, to capture the 8 hour event through the night. I know forecasts cant be relied on but thankfully, this forecast got it right this time! Clear skies all the way through...what a contrast to my endeavour to capture previous year's partial solar eclipse for which I travelled to Eastbourne and remoted a telescope in London as backup...only for the whole event to be washed out with 100% cloud cover in nearly the whole of England. The hotel balcony provided a great view of the Lunar Eclipse as I watched our moon turn slowly redder and redder. What an amazing sight.
For this sequence, I faced a slight problem. I had no end point when the eclipse finished (due to my hotel balcony view in Hastings just clipping the end part of the eclipse. I didnt want to do this outside for fear of a few drunks around I saw out on the street that night! But my balcony view was good enough for my to have a near complete sequence. How to present it without that final full moon emergence, though? Well, as you can see, my solution was to sequence it as a circle in which it wraps around back to the full moon that was taken just before the eclipse. As a bonus, I did not have to rotate the images as this was automatically rotating due to my tracking mount being an Alt-Az (Altitude-Azimuth) which naturally rotates the view over time.
The image in the centre is of the peak totality.
My selections of exposures is not perfect but this is the very first time I have done an image sequence and I am very happy with what I have done here as my first time.
I had so many images of different ISOs and shutterspeed exposure settings at every stage so I was able to pick and choose to give this mosaic the smoothest consistent transition of tones I could get.
This has been such an enjoyable endeavour and experience especially of the Lunar Eclipse itself.
Capture and processing information:
Location: Hastings, from the balcony of a room rented for one night at Lindum Hotel overlooking the sea.
Camera: Canon 1100D
Telescope: 80mm Equinox APO refractor
Mount: Nexstar 8se Goto
ISO: 100 for the early stages, then 400 for later blood moon stages.
Exposures: varied from 1/500 early stages to 2 seconds later stages then back down to 1/500 on the shadow exit stages.
Assembled and post processed with Camera Raw and Photoshop.