Wow what a night it was.
It was so nice to see the clear skies after the crap weather Sydney has had in the last week. Not a cloud in the sky all night.
It was a flurry of activity for me during the night, as a few days before, SLOOH contacted me to ask if I could supply images for their live feed. After installing and setting up the required software yesterday morning, I did a few test images last night and they worked great.
The seeing was fantastic - and thankfully, the Moon must've been close to apogee, because I could fit the whole Moon in the FOV of the sensor with only a few pixels to spare top and bottom. Most times, I can't fit the whole Moon so I have to do a mosaic.
But with uploading to SLOOH, it was great to be able to take the image using Canon remote shooting software, save it into a specific directory and have it automatically resize, sharpen, crop and upload to SLOOH.
I had the SLOOH events website running with the commentary in the background, while I was taking an image every 3 minutes for them, in the middle of watching IceInSpace get crushed under the load of visitors to the site, as well as posting progress images on Facebook and Google+ every 15 minutes.
At around 1:20am the Moon went behind a tree. I knew it was coming, but I was thankful it happened after full totality began. I was going to move my whole setup about 15m to the West, but at 1:30am when I looked at where I was going to put it, the Moon still wouldn't be visible for another 20-30 minutes, and knowing I had to get up at 6am, I called it a night.
It was just a fantastic experience though - completely different from my previous lunar eclipses. August 2007 I was on the edge of Tuggerah Lake, and early this year in June I was up in Brisbane for work standing on the edge of the river overlooking the city with nothing but camera and tripod.
The Moon was quite low in the North and some widefield type images may have even worked this time, but I was glad to have tracking - especially when my exposures needed to be 1-2 seconds as it went into totality.
I just plonked the mount down though and didn't do any alignment, so had to continually use the hand controller to keep the Moon in the frame.
The
eclipse article ended up with > 60,000 views. Over 40,000 of those were yesterday alone.
If IceInSpace hadn't been crashing and timing out during that hour before midnight, I'm sure it would be another 10,000 higher!
Was a great night!
Thanks for sharing all the great pictures! I'll post some final versions in the next few days once I gather them together.
Missed totality completely, bucketing rain again now.
