Partial Lunar Eclipse Live Webcast

Via this post on the SPA BB:

2008 AUGUST 16 -- PARTIAL LUNAR ECLIPSE
Webcast live from Peter Grego at St Dennis, Cornwall

I will be producing a live webcast of the partial lunar eclipse on the evening of 16 August on my website www.lunarobservers.com. The webcast takes place from 19:30 to 22:45 UT (8:30 to 11:45 pm BST). Images are updated every 20 seconds when live (640x480 resolution). The umbral phase of the eclipse lasts from 8:36 until 11:44 pm BST. If the event is clouded out a real-time computer simulation of the eclipse will be broadcast.

More details over here.

Today's Eclipse: A Short Photo Diary

Just to add a little to my log of today's eclipse, a short photo diary of the session:

The session didn't start out too well, the Solarscope went flying in the wind so I had to come up with a method of making it heavier. I knew all those old power supplies would come in handy one day:

With the flying 'scope problem pretty much solved, the main event got under way:




However, the wind picked up, so more weight was needed. This is why you should never throw away that old laptop battery:


Soon, it got cloudy. Time to photograph my amazing solar observatory then:


Of course, because we were getting close to mid-eclipse, it wasn't a case of the whole sky being cloudy. Oh no. Towards the Sun it looked like this:


Whereas behind me:


However, around mid-eclipse, things did clear up:


So it wasn't a total loss. :-)

Eclipse Observing Log

I've now uploaded my observing log from today's eclipse. There's a handful of photographs in there too. Nothing too special, just captures of the view as seen via the Solarscope.

I'll probably get around to uploading some more elsewhere at some point. I'll post here when I do.

The eclipse is over for me

Well, that's it for me. The earlier fair weather turned increasingly cloudy and, at around 10:50 BST, I was pretty much clouded out.

I had a reasonable run though. Managed to see the very start of the eclipse and got a good, albeit short, view around mid-eclipse. You can see the updates I made over on Twitter and Plurk (the latter being a new one to me but I thought I'd give it a go to see what it's like).

I'll try and type up my log later on. I've also got a bunch of photographs which I took on my Canon PowerShot G9. Once I've downloaded them and processed them they'll appear in the photography section of my main site and also over on my Flickr stream.

Looking good so far...

With about ½ hour to go to the start of the partial solar eclipse I've got mostly clear skies with just a few little fluffy clouds floating about.

Fingers crossed things go better than back in March 2006.

I'll try and make frequent updates over on Twitter.

If You're in London on Friday 1st August...

If you're in London tomorrow, and have some free time in the morning, this might interest you:

The society have got permission to take a few telescopes along to Hyde Park in London, near Speakers' Corner, to view the partial eclipse on Friday morning, which is between 9.32 and 11.03 am BST, with mid eclipse at 10.16. The Sun will be about 20% covered (see separate thread for what this means).

Any members who care to join us will be very welcome, though we only have permission for a few small telescopes so we don't need any more. It is possible that the media will be there as well as we are sending out a press release.

Next week's lunar eclipse

I'm not sure if I'll get to observe next week's total lunar eclipse (assuming the weather will be fine) due to the fact that a) it's during the working week and b) all the fun stuff happens at silly hours. Which is sort of annoying given just how enjoyable the last one was (even if I did manage to destroy a pair of glasses).

However, if anyone is thinking of staying up for it, you might find this article by the Society for Popular Astronomy useful as it as all the information you'll need. This includes details of the planned LunarObservers.com live webcast.

Shooting the Moon

Just recently I purchased a second lens (a Tamron AF 55-200mm f4.5-5.6 Di II LD) for my Canon EOS 400D. It wasn't until yesterday that I managed to give it a proper test.

Just before bedtime I noticed it was clear and that the Moon was pretty high so I thought it would be interesting to see how large it appears when captured with the new lens attached (previous efforts amply demonstrated that — no surprises here — the Moon doesn't appear very large at 55mm). So I wandered outside, set the lens to 200m and ran off some shots hand-held.

The result isn't actually that bad. If I'm in a position to observe the lunar eclipse next month (during the week, during the early hours of the morning, typical!) it might be worth trying to get a few shots.

Of course, now, I'm wishing for a 300mm lens. ;-)

Not Just Red - Infrared!

Once again Pete Lawrence comes up with an interesting spin on astrophotography. Via this article on the SPA BB:

The eclipsed Moon was quite dim in visible light but reasonably bright in IR. I managed to grab 4 quadrant shots of the Moon at the time of totality, mosaic them together and then overlay a DSLR colour shot on to. In this way the IR provides the luminance information while the DSLR shot provides colour. The result is an IR biased colour shot of totality. As the IR signal was reasonably bright, the details on the Moon could be imaged with a reasonable amount of sharpness.

2007-03-03_23-28-20_IR742-natural.jpg

Lunar Eclipse Movie

Tim Haynes (friend and BOFH for the machine I host my websites on) was also out on Saturday night, observing and photographing the total lunar eclipse.

Not only did he take a whole load of images of the event, he also produced a pretty neat video of it too:

It's a shame that the Moon has got squashed in the YouTube version (the original looks better) but, that aside, I think it's a pretty neat record of the event.

What the hell is happening?

After reading this entry on Rich Daley's blog I was reminded of something I was thinking about on Saturday night.

What do people who have no knowledge or interest in astronomy make of something like a total lunar eclipse? Here in the UK you'd be hard pushed to find someone who didn't know that a total solar eclipse was coming, it's such a rare occurrence that it would be reported everywhere for days prior to the event (as it was in 1999). Most partial solar eclipses won't be noticed, most people who haven't been told about it won't know it's happening.

Partial lunar eclipses probably aren't noticed either, I'm guessing that most people, even if they noticed that part of the Moon was missing, would assume it's just one of the Moon's phases (it's not uncommon for people to think that the Earth's shadow is responsible for the Moon's phases).

But a total lunar eclipse seems a little different to me. It's one of those events that can be reported in such a way that people don't know it's happening (personally I only ever saw mention of Saturday's eclipse, in passing, during weather reports on the BBC news) while, at the same time, is very obvious to the naked eye – if you were out and about on Saturday night you'd be hard pushed not to notice that the Moon was full but wasn't bright and was a very strange colour.

I wonder what Rich's bouncer was really thinking. I wonder what ideas had gone through his mind. I wonder what possible reasons he'd entertained. I wonder how many other people were in the same position last Saturday, faced with something out of the ordinary, something impossible to ignore, something needing an explanation. I wonder what hypotheses they entertained.

Lunar Eclipse 2007-03-03 - Log now up

I've now uploaded my observing log of the total lunar eclipse.

Lunar Eclipse 2007-03-03

As I'd hoped a couple of days earlier the weather played ball and last Saturday night was nice and clear.

So I got to observe the whole of the total lunar eclipse. For some detail of my observing session have a look at the short report I wrote on the SPA BB this morning – I'll be adding my full observing log later on today.

I didn't bother to attempt any photography (other than a few afocal shots with my mobile phone, through the Antares 905 – a small example can be seen above), I just wanted to observe and enjoy the whole event (and it's not like it wasn't going to get photographed by anyone else <g>).

I thought totality was reasonably dark, personally I'd rate it as L2 on the Danjon Scale.

Just one downside to the whole event: I managed to stand on my glasses and scratch them so badly that they're not really useful any more. Thanks to that I think this has been my most expensive observing session yet. It was also kind of annoying to find myself observing a great naked-eye event and find that the only bit of optical equipment I had with me that wasn't working was.... my eyes.

There was a nice little bonus to the whole evening though. After we'd packed up (after last umbral contact), and because there was so much dew on the grass, I stood with my back to the full Moon and noticed a nice, if faint, example of Heiligenschein.

Next week's lunar eclipse

Like Will, I'm already thinking about observing next week's lunar eclipse.

All being well, weather permitting (sadly the 6 to 15 day forecast from the Met Office doesn't give much of a clue about what to expect), I'm hoping to join a fellow observer a Woodland Waters (somewhere we've used once so far and were very happy with). The horizon there is pretty good and should give an unobstructed view of the whole event.

Even though I now own a dSLR it's unlikely that I'll be taking any photographs of the event due to the fact that I don't have the kinds of equipment that make it worth it, although I might try something — during the last lunar eclipse the fact that I only had a compact digital camera didn't stop me from trying to make some sort of photographic record.

Visually I'll probably be using a 10x50 binocular and the Antares 905. Pretty much all of my observing will be visual and, of course, I'll be keeping a written record of the event.

Fingers crossed that the weather plays ball again...