January 17, 2011

Lunar Eclipse Pics - FINALLY!!!

Sorry for the long delay.  School caught up to me and has kept me incredibly busy.  I could rattle off the reasons, but I doubt you want to hear me whining. 

Alas, here are my favorite pictures (of about 500 or so) from the total lunar eclipse of December 21st, 2010. 

I had two setups going.  One was just a DSLR identical to mine (Canon EOS Rebel XS) with the 18-55mm IS Lens.  The pictures taken with those are the ones that give a wide field of view with the constellations in them.

The other setup was my DSLR hooked up to the back of the Orion Sirius EON 120ED EQ-G GoTo Refractor.  Those pictures are the close-up shots of the Moon.

Overall I was very happy with the pictures.  The lone DSLR got some great artistic shots and required not much effort.  I did have to focus using the LiveView function and zooming in 10x on a far away radio tower - but it seemed to work.  With the telescope setup, there were a few that were out of focus which frustrated me, but luckily I did get a few really good ones. 

What to do with all of these pictures?  I'd like to photoshop some of them into one single picture that shows the track of the Moon through the umbra or something like that.  I haven't gotten into Photoshop quite yet, so that's later.  Anyone have suggestions, ideas, resources for putting these images together in one shot?

Definitely my favorite shot with the DSLR only.  F4.0  30s   ISO400   27mm
 Another great one, with star trails of Orion.  F4.0  360s   ISO100   27mm
 Toward the beginning of the eclipse 1/200s   ISO100  through scope
My favorite of the bunch  3.2s   ISO400  through scope

Here are the rest of them - Total Eclipse Pictures

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