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James Riches
Lunar Eclipse Viewing by James Riches, February 20, 2008
I wasn’t planning on imaging the lunar eclipse in February, but as I was driving home from work that night and saw the full moon peeking from behind the streams of clouds, I new I couldn’t resist.
I’m still fairly green to astronomy, and this was my first attempt at prime focus astrophotography. So I set up my 10” Meade LX90 in my backyard in suburban Lake Worth, and took the following images using my wife’s Canon Rebel XT DSLR, and a 0.63 focal reducer.
The first image is a stack of about 10 shots, approximately a half-hour before the eclipse began. Occasionally a cloud would drift across the moon face, but it was clear enough to get good focus. I played with this image a little in Photoshop to improve the contrast.
The other mosaics were compiled in Photoshop from the raw photos, unaltered. Varying exposures were used as totality approached. About ¾ of the way to totality, the clouds moved in, but they had enough gaps between them such that I could still take a picture every 5 minutes or so.
Unfortunately, I was on an alt-az mount, and the stack up of hardware was close to bottoming out, so I wasn’t able to shoot beyond totality. None-the-less, when I came inside to download the images, I was quite happy with my first attempt at prime focus astrophotography with a DSLR!
James Riches
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Lunar Eclipse Photos |
by James Riches |
| Click the thumbnail to see full-sized picture |
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