A way overdue gallery post, as I have finally managed to sort and post my images of the September 2015 Total Lunar Eclipse. The weather was excellent in Oxfordshire for this event which started at 01:11UT and finished at 06:22UT.
This eclipse occurred with the moon close to perigee, and appeared very dark to the naked eye. Our daughter (aged 5) even got up in the middle of the night to have a look through Daddy’s telescope at the moon and did this amazing drawing the next morning all by herself!
My image around maximum eclipse was used on the Oxford Mail website as the header image for the article on the event. The gallery below is a selection of images from all the ones I took – these were all taken using a Nikon D70s through a William Optics 110FLT. Exposures range from fractions of seconds for the partial phases, right up to 10 seconds for the images at maximum, which shows the range of brightness across the whole eclipse. My imaging finished at about 6am when the moon was occulted by the garden fence so I didn’t quite get the last stages of the eclipse (though I got an hour or so back in bed before work)!
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A very quick post of the conjunction tonight between the Moon and Jupiter. I find these types of conjunction notoriously hard to photo, especially close to full moon. This is mostly due to the wide field required and the difference in brightnesses between the two objects.
I’ve tweaked the curves a little within Photoshop to allow both objects to be displayed without blitzing out the lunar details – but the eye is much better at coping with these scenarios with its non-linear response and massive dynamic range!
The wider field of the Nikon lens for these photos shows just how good telescope optics are as well compared to “standard” DSLR lenses – there is a fair bit of blue fringing around the moon’s eastern limb, which isn’t particularly obvious in photos through the Takahashi FC60 or the William Optics FLT110.
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The lunar eclipse of the 3rd March 2007 brought clear skies and good conditions across much of the UK, with only some thin high cloud arriving in Oxfordshire towards the end of the eclipse. Maximum eclipse occured at 23:20:56 – ideally timed for the UK.
More recently, on the 21st February, 2008, another lunar eclipse was visible from the UK and Europe early in the morning. However, the weather for this event was not as favourable with cloudy conditions across much of the UK (despite having a long period of clear weather in the preceding week!).
Continue reading Lunar Eclipse of March 3rd 2007 →
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In late March, 2006 I travelled to Turkey to watch the total solar eclipse. After flying to Antalya, we drove to Kalkan (220 km west) where we stayed for a week around the eclipse. We observed 1m57s of totality from the villa in excellent conditions.
Continue reading Total Eclipse of March 29, 2006 →
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Astronomy and Astrophotography