Total Eclipse of the Moon

[Fay]

There is a total eclipse of the Moon, tonight. Last one for 7 years.

It will begin at 1.40am & end around 5.09am tomorrow.

[Carole]

Would love to see and image it, but have to go to work tomorrow, so don't know whether I will take a chance of lack of sleep.

Carole

[doug]

     We will set the alarm clock and hopefully will hear it and arise to view.  Hope the neighbours don`t object to us stumbling about in the garden at 0.300 hrs.

[Daniel]

Just looking at the satelite imagery on the Met office website and it doesn't look that hopefull we'll see anything unfortunately.

[MarkS]

What a disappointment!

I set up my equipment just in the right place so the moon would come down between a couple of trees; got up in the middle of the night and guess what.  Cloud!

Now I've got to wait 7 years ...

[JohnP]

Mark I know it's no consolation but this is my sequence of images with an EOS from last March... I actually got up at 2.30am for a quick peek but was back in bed at 2.30am & 30secs....

Sorry - John

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.punnett/graphics/oas/eclipse_montage.jpg

[Fay]

I think that lovely sequence of Moon images, will make Mark pig sick!!!!

[MarkS]

Very nice montage John. 

I actually did manage to see it last March but I was on safari in Kenya and I only had a telephoto lens with me.  They're on my website here:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/the_shelleys/Astronomy/

The site is a chronology of my faltering attempts to do astrophotography.  I got my first ever telescope for Christmas just over a year ago and I knew absolutely nothing.  I was hugely disappointed to look through the telescope and NOT see all the beautiful colours I'd seen in books.  And worse still, some of my favourite objects from books (e.g. Horsehead and Andromeda Galaxy) were either actually invisible in the eyepiece or just a nondescript fuzzy blob.   I think astrophotography was (and maybe still is) a subconscious desire to deal with that disappointment.

[Ian]

not sub-concious at all in my case. Once I established I could see far more with a camera than my eyes, at least from home, then astrophography was the obvious thing to do.

Still like the buzz of seeing stuff in the lightbridge at DSC though. But that's very different to observing in London.

[Fay]

Interesting website, Mark

[Rick]

It seems Toronto was the place to be.

See http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/archives/004514.html

[TonyB]

I stared at a dismal cloudy sky, and a few spots of rain, from 2am till 4:15! There's optimism! Just two minutes before the end of full eclipse it was just possible to see it through a slightly thinner layer of cloud. I tried to photograph it with my ETX70 ( can't manage the other scope while on crutches) and produced a poor Moon-shaped smudge, just enough to prove I saw it.
I'm afraid I won't be able to make it to the DSC or meeting - will still be on these sticks for another three weeks at least. The more I look after the knee at this stage the better the chance of return to full activity later.

I hope you have lots of clear skies for the DSC.

TonyB

[Fay]

So nice to hear from you, Tony. You must be recovering & getting back to your old self, staying up all those hours!!!!!! I thought you were going to give us the only image for a moment!

[JohnP]

Cool mark - I didn't know you had a webpage - nice to see your progression. I particularly like your star trail image from spain. I've always wanted to try a shot like this... I was always worried that if you took lots of shorter exposures rather than one long one you'd end up with lots of dotted star trails rather than a continuous line... This is obviously not the case at a short focal length...

John.

[Mike]

Well here's my pic.....

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080222.html