Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

You may be aware that last night a lunar eclipse occurred that was visible from North America. The last time my friend Tim Miller and I photographed a lunar eclipse was January 20, 2000, and the temperature outside was -11F. Fast forward 8 years to last night, and temperatures were much better: 3F.

Temperature wasn’t the only difference. The rig we used to photograph the eclipse was also somewhat different this time around. Here’s a picture of me with our equipment.

And here’s Tim.

Now you know the cast of characters. The towels hanging over the scope were used to shield some parts from frost accumulation as the night progressed.

The last time we took eclipse pictures, we used a 35mm Nikon film camera, the model number of which escapes me, through our Meade LX200 12″ f/10 scope (the big telescope in the pictures) with an f/6.3 focal reducer. That particular combination of camera and scope worked out well for getting a frame-filling full moon projected onto the film. This time around, however, with the LX200 and focal reducer, the image of the moon was too large and we couldn’t fit in the whole thing. So instead we had to use the Celestron SP-C80 80mm f/11.4 mounted on the top of the LX200 to get pictures. The moon fit into the frame, although it was a tad smaller than we wanted, but still acceptable. The Celestron is mounted on the top of the LX200 because the LX200 has a tracking motor that allows both scopes to follow the moon without having to move it by hand.

So why did an f/10 and f/6.3 SCT not give us a full moon picture, but an f/11.4 refractor did? I dunno. I don’t understand what I need to in order to explain what happened. I’ll have to do some reading.

To mount the camera onto the Celestron, we used a T-ring adapter and an extension tube, as such.

Here it all is from the front, just for fun.

So how did pictures of the eclipse turn out? We took about 160 pictures over the course of the evening and I haven’t had a chance to inspect each one yet. However, I have chosen a handful that stand out, from different stages of the eclipse. These images have been scaled down to fit on this page, but they have not been processed in any way except for cropping. In the future when I have a little time to adjust these images I may post some that are cleaned up. All pictures are taken with a Canon D60 digital camera set at ISO 400. I’ve noted the exposure times below each picture.

1/750s

1s

3s

2s

1/350s

1/500s

I’m pretty proud of those.