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| 10 November 2003 | TOTAL LUNAR ECLIPSE |
Brian Grainger |
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TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MOON
It may not look much but the above sequence of photos was taken with a cheap, (£50), digital camera - the Aiptek Mega Camera, a 1.1 mega pixel pencam. Exposure time and colour balance is automatic so I could make no adjustment for night sky viewing. Using the camera and processing the photos with my computer I now have a historical record of a significant astronomical event. This is the first time I have had any success with night photography with this camera. I think the moon, being sufficiently bright, is the only object it will capture, although I was pleasantly surprised that it still captured something when the moon was almost covered by the Earth's shadow. All the above images, except for the 00:34 image, are untouched. The 00:34 image had to have some extraneous white image removed. I assumed this was caused by camera shake. The camera images were processed through IrfanView software. The time taken was superimposed and the resulting image cropped. No magnification has been applied. The eclipse parameters for the location, calculated by using Redshift 4 software with the location latitude and longitude for my postcode taken from http://www.multimap.com, were:
You can see that the camera could not pick up the faint amount of light left 3 minutes before the start of totality, but, considering its cheapness, I was not surprised. The other thing the camera could not pick out was the red shading of the dark part of the moon when the umbra shadow was sufficiently well advanced. The red effect comes from the scattering of light from the earth's atmosphere falling on the moon and it was particularly noticeable for this eclipse. I have to say that this was a wonderful viewing experience. After a very dull cloudy day the skies magically cleared for the start of the eclipse. Usually it is the other way round in this country! There was a period of 10 minutes during the creep of the Earth's shadow when patchy cloud intervened but it was totally clear for the start of totality. Stars such as the Pleiades that were previously invisible to the naked eye, because of their closeness to the bright full moon, were now visible again. Rather more solid cloud intervened about half way through the period of totality but the skies were again clear from 02:00 when the bright moon was starting to dominate again. I only tried taking the photos just to see what would happen. I was not expecting much to result as previous night time photography had not worked. I only wish I had tried to photograph through my binoculars now! Still, there is always the next eclipse. There are two more in 2004, although I don't think either is viewable at any sensible time in Stevenage. It will still be daylight for the one in May and the one in October is not till about 03:00. The next total lunar eclipse after that is in 2007. Maybe I will have a better camera by then! Note: If you want to see some more spectacular photos of the eclipse, taken with rather more expensive cameras, go to: |
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