Drac0
24-10-2022, 10:08 PM
Weather permitting of course, I'm hoping to capture the upcoming lunar eclipse, my fist in over 4 years. All except one since then has been clouded out & the other I was too busy to get out for it. Maybe this time.
Initially I was going with 3 setups - one for a moon close up, a wider one to catch Uranus as well & a 3rd wide field on just a tripod. But decided on doing just two:
Canon 6D, 102mm F/7 + 0.8x reducer (F/5.5) on an AZ-EQ5. This setup will be wide enough to capture the Moon & Uranus with enough resolution to crop in on the Moon if I want. It also gives me the room to play with exposure time & ISO to cover the 10 or 11 stops of light needed to cover the eclipse.
Canon 70D or 1100D on a tripod with a F/2.8 lens set between 16mm & 20mm depending on the foreground I have. This will allow me to get an image similar to my one from 2018 (attached, @ 20mm, that's Mars on the left). Again with enough adjustment to exposure settings to cover the needed changes in brightness.
Can't decide whether to use EQ or alt-az mode. As. here on the east coast. the penumbral part of the eclipse starts before moonrise & the actual eclipse about 30 minutes after sunset I'm thinking alt-az to save doing a full polar alignment giving me time to be fully ready to go by 8:00pm - partial eclipse starts at 8:09pm.
I'm still tossing up the number of images to take & the gap between exposures. I want to make 30 sec to 40 sec time lapse videos just unsure of a good frame rate to use. Will probably do an image every 15-20 seconds which will compress the 4 hours into ~30 seconds @ 30 fps.
Imaging will be controlled by two instances of APT, I'm trying to set it up so that at no stage will both cameras be imaging/transferring data at exactly the same time to avoid overloading the USB2 connection - may even attach each camera to a separate USB port rather than a hub, though one will still have to share a connection with the mount/focuser - not much of an issue there.
Well, that's my preliminary plans, hopefully the weather will co-operate for once. What's everyone else thinking of doing?
Cheers,
Mark
Initially I was going with 3 setups - one for a moon close up, a wider one to catch Uranus as well & a 3rd wide field on just a tripod. But decided on doing just two:
Canon 6D, 102mm F/7 + 0.8x reducer (F/5.5) on an AZ-EQ5. This setup will be wide enough to capture the Moon & Uranus with enough resolution to crop in on the Moon if I want. It also gives me the room to play with exposure time & ISO to cover the 10 or 11 stops of light needed to cover the eclipse.
Canon 70D or 1100D on a tripod with a F/2.8 lens set between 16mm & 20mm depending on the foreground I have. This will allow me to get an image similar to my one from 2018 (attached, @ 20mm, that's Mars on the left). Again with enough adjustment to exposure settings to cover the needed changes in brightness.
Can't decide whether to use EQ or alt-az mode. As. here on the east coast. the penumbral part of the eclipse starts before moonrise & the actual eclipse about 30 minutes after sunset I'm thinking alt-az to save doing a full polar alignment giving me time to be fully ready to go by 8:00pm - partial eclipse starts at 8:09pm.
I'm still tossing up the number of images to take & the gap between exposures. I want to make 30 sec to 40 sec time lapse videos just unsure of a good frame rate to use. Will probably do an image every 15-20 seconds which will compress the 4 hours into ~30 seconds @ 30 fps.
Imaging will be controlled by two instances of APT, I'm trying to set it up so that at no stage will both cameras be imaging/transferring data at exactly the same time to avoid overloading the USB2 connection - may even attach each camera to a separate USB port rather than a hub, though one will still have to share a connection with the mount/focuser - not much of an issue there.
Well, that's my preliminary plans, hopefully the weather will co-operate for once. What's everyone else thinking of doing?
Cheers,
Mark