December Full Moon, 1 hour before the Total Lunar Eclipse

[iceman (Mike)]

On Saturday night, I was outside preparing to photograph the Total Lunar Eclipse which was due to take place in one hour – taking some test images, getting focus right, and testing the upload process as I was planning to supply images to SLOOH as part of their lunar eclipse event.

The seeing was absolutely fantastic, hardly any movement in the Moon and so I grabbed a quick 100 frames to produce this pre-eclipse Full Moon image. The actual Total Lunar Eclipse images of the Moon will come in the next few days

As usual, there's a black and white version and the colour version, processed using the method in my tutorial.

Full versions here:
- Black and White
- Colour
- Blog: December Full Moon 1 Hour Before the Total Lunar eclipse

I think it's my best full Moon image to date, thanks to the good steady seeing.
Canon 40D, ED80, 1/250s exposure @ ISO400. 70 of the best 100 frames stacked in Registax and processed in Photoshop.

Comments welcome.

[davidpretorius]

Sweet moonage mike.

love it!

[Jen]

wow nice Mike

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks Dave and Jen

[nandopg]

Hi Mike,

Great result !! I love the color version and I think that a good print of it would be an outstanding portrait.

Congrats for the achievement !!

Fernando

[multiweb (Marc)]

That is sharp indeed. Nice one.

[Troy]

Good pictures mike. sharp

[iceman (Mike)]

Thanks Marc and Troy

It's best seeing I've had while imaging the Moon with that setup.

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by nandopg

Hi Mike,

Great result !! I love the color version and I think that a good print of it would be an outstanding portrait.

Congrats for the achievement !!

Fernando

Thanks Fernando. I'm hoping to make a large sequence including one of these images which will hopefully be good enough to print.

[zardos123 (Brad)]

very nice, how did the image transmission go? i did not expect good weather so when i saw the great seeing i raced home and set up as quick as possible so missed the first few minutes i'm only a few k's north of you the seeing was great if unexpected
regards brad

[iceman (Mike)]

Originally Posted by zardos123

very nice, how did the image transmission go? i did not expect good weather so when i saw the great seeing i raced home and set up as quick as possible so missed the first few minutes i'm only a few k's north of you the seeing was great if unexpected
regards brad

Hi Brad
The transmission went really well. I had the events page open listening to their commentary from Bob Berwin (sp?) - he was good. Entertaining, had guests and callers.
Originally they were going to call me and have me on air but never got around to it.

My images looked good on the transmission, but they took up too much of the frame. Because the Moon literally *just* fit in the FOV, after their software cropped and resized it for upload, it took up the whole space in the 'view port window' on the SLOOH site.
They looked good, but would've preferred a bit of black space around it.

The process itself for upload was nice and easy. I just dumped fresh images into a directory that had a different program watching the directory to grab the images, resize, crop and upload. I could've dumped them straight from the camera into that directory, but I wanted to do an auto-colour on most of them first because I was using my modded camera.