My Birthday Eclipse - Images included now.

Astroman (Andrew Wall) · #1 29-07-2018, 01:03 PM

Hi all,

Coinciding with my 45th Birthday, or was that coinciding with the Lunar Eclipse, either way, both of these events happened together on the same day. What a treat. Leading up to the eclipse it was touch and go with the cloud forecast and even a day before it looked highly unlikely I would see "my" eclipse.

Luckily for me, the weather gods played nicely and treated me with clear skies, just before the event.

I decided a while ago, it would be nice to capture this eclipse with some sort of foreground, instead of just building or the ocean. So I decided to try for Mt Remarkable in South Australia, why not... I used Google maps, an app on my phone called MoonCalc, Stellarium and the Time and Date website for timing and positioning information. I worked out a good spot by using google street view.

With all that in hand and equipment loaded into my car, I set off on the Friday night. I arrived at my chosen location about 2 hours prior to the eclipse starting (2:44am) I was a little closer to the National Park than I had hoped, but it was going to be good enough I think. I set up my equipment and made sure I was focused... The dew prevented me from getting the exposure I was hoping to get in the wide field camera, but that's ok, I'm happy with what I got. I am still going through the thousands of photo's I took but here is a small collection.

It was even topped off with a Pass by the International Space Station at 6:40am about 45 minutes before Sunrise.

I will add to this post that the ISS pass image is a composite image, I have superimposed a Moon shot at the same time from my Telescope onto the image. Yes it looks dodgy, but I didn't like the trailing at the time of making the image. The original is in comments below.

Astroman (Andrew Wall) · #2 29-07-2018, 01:14 PM

All images are working now.

Peter Ward · #3 29-07-2018, 11:37 PM

Maaate....the wide angle shot with the ISS is a poorly constructed composite...bright red moon in a bright blue sky?!

.....which begs the question about the rest.

Astroman (Andrew Wall) · #4 30-07-2018, 06:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Maaate....the wide angle shot with the ISS is a poorly constructed composite...bright red moon in a bright blue sky?!

.....which begs the question about the rest.

Hi Peter, thanks for commenting. Yes I did composite that image, maybe I should have mentioned it in my post

I agree it did look a little dodgy to me also, but I decided to keep it that way. In the original the Moon and mars were moving quite a bit and there was a large trailing, which I thought at the time looked ugly. Although it does show how far the earth had rotated in the time the ISS had passed. As for the rest of the images, they are as original as they came off the camera. With exception of the Moon Eclipse Sequence of course. Even my wife picked a fault with that one, which I haven't fixed in post processing yet. Anyway here is the original image taken straight from StarStax. The program I used to put all the images together.