My first decent moon shot in ages. Handheld iPhone 7, shooting through a Celestron NexStar 8SE and an Orion 32mm Plossl, contrast punched up using curves in SnapSeed.
Archive for the ‘Full moon’ Category
Observing Report: Total lunar eclipse on January 31, 2018
February 2, 2018
Man, only the second post in six months, and we’re back to another eclipse! Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
This is also going to a short post. I have more photos from the eclipse, and I’m hoping to get them processed soon and put into a composite like I did for the October, 2014 (link), and April, 2015 (link), lunar eclipses. But those photos are still lurking in a raw state on my hard drive. You’re getting the only two I’ve processed so far: the above shot of the full moon at 12:20 AM, before the eclipse started, taken with a Nikon Coolpix 4500, and the below shot from the start of max eclipse, around 5:00 AM, taken with an iPhone 7. Both shots taken afocally through London’s XT4.5 dob and a 32mm Plossl.
Hope you got to see it. Stand by for more shots…at some point. Hopefully. What can I say? Fossil season came early this year…as I knew it eventually would.
Observing Report: Total lunar eclipse on April 4, 2015
April 5, 2015
I stayed up late Friday night to catch the beginning of the lunar eclipse early Saturday morning. The penumbral eclipse started at 3:16 AM local time, and it was still going on when the sun rose. The umbral or ‘total’ eclipse was very brief, just five minutes between 4:58 and 5:03. Just like last October, I got London up to see it. He was kind enough to loan me his 60mm Meade refractor for the event, and he used his XT4.5. The little Meade refractor made photography easier by cutting down the light level without sacrificing contrast. I took all of these photos with my iPhone 5C shooting through a Celestron 8-24mm zoom eyepiece. As usual, I processed and composited the photos in GIMP.
I’m particularly happy with this shot of the full moon. I really need to do a composite image with all of my best full moon shots. One of these days.
Previous lunar eclipse reports:
Previous full moons:
The Oct. 8, 2014, full moon
October 13, 2014
A big motivator for me in digiscoping is to see how good of a result I can get from very modest equipment. This image of the full moon from just a couple of hours before the recent lunar eclipse is a good example. It’s my sharpest iPhone moon photo. When I imported it into GIMP to touch it up, I noticed that it wasn’t left-right reversed like all of the other photos I’d taken through my 4-inch refractor. I couldn’t figure out why that would be. Then I remembered that I had started the evening using the GalileoScope, which David DeLano had equipped with a diagonal and a helical focuser. The diagonal is a prism, which can be ghastly, but this one is from StellarVue and it holds its own against a mirror diagonal. So I actually got this photo with the camera on my phone, shooting through a 2-inch plastic telescope that initially sold for $15. I like that.
Here are my previous full moon photos:
Evidently photographing the perfectly full moon is roughly annual obsession of mine. I haven’t put the new photo against the older ones to see how it stacks up in terms of libration and limb features, but I’m sure I’ll get around to that sooner or later.
10 Minute Astronomy 