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| Partial Lunar Eclipse: 2008-08-16 |
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Date
- 16 - 17 August 2008
- 18:00 - 01:30
Location
- Boyden, Bloemfontein
- 29°02'20" S 26°24'14" E
Equipment
- Canon 30D attached to a Orion Maksutov 102mm telescope
(Prime Focus)
- Focal Length: 2080m (including the 1.6 factor of the camera).
- The Camera and telescope combination was mounted on a Celestron 11 GPS in Lunar tracking mode. I had to make corrections every 30 minutes, due to a "not so perfect balanced scope."
- Alignment stars to set up telescope: Spica (W) Altair (NE).
Exposure
- F-stop 12.7
- Shutter speed - Mainly 1/500 (Also experimented with 1/1000 and slower (1/15 - 1/250)
- ISO 400 - 1600. Mainly 400 and 800 ISO
Software
- Camera was connected to Laptop computer.
- Images Plus software was used to control the camera and RAW images were taken.
- It was set to take an image every 20 seconds. 564 images were taken during the partial eclipse.
- Initial focusing on a star was done with ImagesPlus.
- I followed the eclipse on TheSky 6 to get an idea what was happening.
- During the "photo shoot" I used Adobe Lightroom 2 to confirm if my exposure and focus was on the dot.
Image Processing
- Initial processing was done in Adobe Lightroom 2.
- Image Processing was done with Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Bridge.
- Images were selected and I used layers for the arrangement.
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Levels
- High Pass filter (This is filter to give vooma to astro images)
- Noiseware Pro Plug in
- Sharpen > Unsharp Mask
Weather conditions
- Cloudy the whole day. Start to clear in the afternoon.
- Dust on the horison. Not clear.
- 18:00 - 12.7°C - Slight wind Unknown direction
- 01:00 - 6.8°C - Slight wind; Unknown direction
Other:
- Jackal heard at 19:30 in the Maselspoort direction. Again 20:15 in Western direction.
- Apparently there is a farm (close to Boyden) where lions are bred. I heard their growling in the midnight hours. (Maybe I was
hallucinating after 5 cups of coffee during the evening!)
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