Earth's Shadow 21 Jan 2019

[MarkS]

The following way of looking at eclipse data seems to have become popular:



I think it has a lot to commend it.

Mark

[Carole]

Oh wow, very clever, but also confusing to a non astro person I would have thought.

Carole

[MarkS]

Oh wow, very clever, but also confusing to a non astro person I would have thought.

I think it's confusing enough for an astro person!

The next thing I want to do is to make another movie.  The previous one showed the earth's shadow passing across the moon.  The next one will keep the shadow fixed and the moon will move through that shadow.

Mark

[Carole]

Interesting. 

Carole

[NoelC]

Very ingenious!
Was that the actual path of the moons transit through the shadow?
Looking forward to the movie.

Noel

[The Thing]

I like that Mark, how did you assemble it? Photoshop layers? Interesting how the red moon appears a little smaller than the fully illuminated disc. An optical illusion that is apparent due to the juxtaposition on your montage no doubt.

[ApophisAstros]

Another great image ,
have you got some specific software for the moon images/videos .?
Roger

[MarkS]

I used Photoshop layers for everything. 

For the video Photoshop did all the image alignment (as a stack of frames) - I just needed to manually align a few frames where it failed. 

I used VirtualDub to create the video from the frames output by Photoshop.

Mark

[MarkS]

Was that the actual path of the moons transit through the shadow?

It depends what you mean.  Of course the moon didn't spiral into the earth's shadow.  On the other hand, the size of the shadow is correct and each moon image is correctly positioned with respect to the shadow.  The moon was also in the upper half of the Earth's shadow at totality, just as you see in my image.

Mark

[MarkS]

There seem to be three obvious ways to make a movie:

• Keep the Moon stationary and watch the Earth's shadow pass over it
• Keep the Earth's shadow stationary and watch the Moon pass through it
• Keep the background stars stationary, then both the Moon and Earth's shadow are in motion

Mark

[RobertM]

That looks excellent Mark, it's an interesting perspective that I've not seen before and looks quite effective.  Must have taken a while to lign everything up ?

Robert