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Old 11-06-2015, 06:25 AM
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MGTechDVP (Mariusz)
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MGTechDVP is offline
 
Join Date: May 2011
Location: Wollongong, Australia
Posts: 272
Lunar Sunset Timelapse

Hi All,

A while back I had an idea to do a timelapse of the moon to see if I would see any shadow moving as the Moon orbits Earth and the sun sets or rises from the terminator vantage point.

I searched on Google and various other popular astronomy forum sites as well as YouTube and could not find any videos that were what I was thinking of, the closest I found was either a timelapse video of the moon moving across the sky, or a timelapse of the lunar phases, some LRO videos etc but nothing with the closeup of the shadow moving across the surface.

I finally had my opportunity to collect the data... The animation consists a stack of 45 seconds @ 30fps captured every 150 seconds. There was a fair amount of haze and high altitude cloud at my location and the seeing was quite poor, so I used a 685nm IR Pass filter to try to cut through the bad seeing. The capture time was between 00:23 - 05:39 AEST (14:23 - 19:39 - 7 June 2015 UT).

This was captured using a Celestron NexStar 8SE on a CGEM mount, using a Imaging source DMK21au618 CDD and a Televue 2.5X powermate for a closer view.

I'm going to do this timelapse again later when I have good seeing and the moon is again at a phase that around the first or last quarter mark to try to get more shadow movement. I'll also grab a frame every 2 minutes to get more frames and get a smoother animation.

https://youtu.be/sFmoODjLNLo

I've also attached the first and last frame comparison side by side.

Thanks for looking.

Mariusz
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