Video 28/8/07 Lunar Eclipse

[Dgar]

Hi, I'm Jon and I'm new on the IceInSpce forums.

I filmed most of Tuesday night's lunar eclipse on my Sony HVR-Z1 HDV Video Camera and edited it to play in fast forward to some music. The filming didn't start until the cloud cover had disappeared and by that time we were well into the first half of the eclipse. Excuse me if I don't use the correct terms, I am a videographer and a casual stargazer. I don't even own a telescope... yet...

Anyhoo, I uploaded the video to Google Video and you guys can check it out here.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...29024&hl=en-AU

It's up on my blog with some photos that my brother took by holding a Canon compact digital camera up to the eypiece of his little hundred dollar telescope from Dick Smiths.

I found out about the eclipse after surfing in to your site from a Google News search on Sunday so I thought I should share these with you all. Hope you like them!


Jon
http://dgar.blogspot.com/

[acropolite (Phil)]

Hi Jon & welcome to IIS. Nice effort with the video.

[starrynight (Philip)]

Excellent clip! I planned to do the same but we had too much cloud up until totality. At that point there was not enough light to see the moon at all except using slow shutter but then there was no colour
I am puzzled as to your tracking Jon.
Did you use a tripod? I do not see to many adjustments as the image should be creeping to the top left corner. All your frames are centred.
No pics from me except that we had about 75 visitors, up here at Brunswick Heads, 3 scopes + binos and lots of interesting questions. Spent a lot of time looking at Jupiter. Best part was seeing the star just grazing the Moon's edge.
So many brilliant photos!!

[iceman (Mike)]

Nice work Jon, lovely video. I'd probably prefer it sped up even more, but i'm impatient

btw to IIS!

[Dgar]

I filmed it using High Definition on a stationary tripod. Every ten minutes or so I would adjust the position of the camera so the Moon was at the bottom of the picture.

After capturing the footage to my PC, I blew the picture up by 200% in Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. This brings it down to about DVD quality from High Definition. It also allows me to move the image as its playing so as to make the Moon appear stationary. The parts where I moved the camera were edited out. There is also a tape change in there as well.

Near the end of the video, some of you may notice lens flares making their way across the screen. That gives away the illusion of tracking and shows that the camera was in a stationary position as the moving Moonlight his the lens.

Apart from making the picture bigger, moving it to simulate tracking, speeding it up and cutting the shaky bits out, there are no other effects on the video.

I've made the Google video downloadable, so feel free to grab a copy of it for yourself. All I ask is that nobody re-edits it. Google Video does damage the quality of the video pretty badly, so I'd be happy to upload a copy of the full quality mpeg version to this site if someone will tell me how?

[starrynight (Philip)]

Jon,
I suggest using www.astroshorts.com This is dedicated to Astronomy clips like yours. I think the limit is 100mb . They give a unique URL which can be private or public.
I have my SCP movie there plus others
http://www.astroshorts.com/view_vide...5300f18b984988
Give it a try!

Philip

[Dgar]

Thanks Philip,

It's now uploaded to Astro Shorts at this address.

http://www.astroshorts.com/view_vide...2ea7fd72d942da

Cheers,

Jon
dgar.blogspot.com