Time-lapse video of the total lunar eclipse on April 15th, 2014.
For this one, I used my RC8 telescope with a Canon 700d and put together a time lapse video. Each exposure was taken 20 seconds apart, although I did miss some while mucking around with the exposure settings. The focal length of the RC8 is such that the moon only just fit within the field of view. I hadn't the opportunity to align my mount properly (set it up during the afternoon - the eclipse began before it was dark), so the moon drifted slightly out of the field of view at times.
Other things that made it into some of the frames - power lines across from my deck (the dangers of urban astrophotography) and a small aircraft flew across during one of the exposures.
Some Details:
- RC8 telescope has a focal length of 1635mm and aperture of 200mm. Mounted on an EQ mount, although not polar aligned.
- 2 second exposures at ISO 400 every 20 seconds (or thereabouts). Altered the exposure settings for the last several frames. Probably shouldn't have.
- Canon 700d has an APSC sensor and a very handy swivel screen.
- I haven't altered the colours of the images - so the red moon isn't artificially enhanced unlike, some of the lunar eclipse images that I've seen on the online.
- I eventually aligned the output images using Photoshop (crashed far too much, so I had to align small batches of images then manually align the batches - a real pain). The video was generated using Final Cut Pro X.
There's another total lunar eclipse in October 2014. Next time round I'll hopefully have a focal reducer in order to have the moon a bit smaller in the field of view, to avoid it getting clipped when drifting. I'll also polar align the mount before the eclipse.
It also looked pretty amazing, though an 80mm refractor telescope that I had piggy-backed to the RC8. I recommend checking it with binoculars next time round if you don't have a telescope!
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| The 'blood moon' - total lunar eclipse April 2014. |
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