A Regal Eclipse

The prospects for this lunar eclipse did not seem too promising with a "winter advisary" in effect this afternoon. The Alberta Clipper came through and hit us with a dusting of snow, making the commute a little longer but prettier. The Clear Sky Clock was boldly predicting that the fast moving storm would move off and not impact viewing, and it was right.

At 10 p.m. I made my way to the side porch, snow crunching underfoot, and found the Moon a gorgeous coppery hue set amid Saturn and Regulus. The north side of the Moon was clearly deeper into the umbra and was fairly dark, probably midway in the Danjon ranking of a 2. Of course the heavy concentration of the dark maria regions in that hemisphere probably increased the effect on that northern limb. It's an odd sight and yet somehow familiar after 40 years of amateur astronomy, a ruddy Mars-Moon orb hanging in the freezing February sky, making me wonder if the view would be similar if I resided on Phobos. It definitely is an oddity than strikes your senses.

Lunar eclipses are big photographic opportunities and challenges. The coloration is beautiful and the wide range of brightness from the limb closest to the Earth's shadow to that farthest is often easy for the eye to appreciate but hard for the photographic medium. In choosing my plan of attack I at first thought of trying to use the "yard sale scope" as a 60mm telephoto lens or at least afocally with my 35mm camera. Manipulating equipment when it's cold out is always a bit challenging, but I soon figured out that the attachment device was not long enough to get the camera to the focal point. Next I tried the digital movie camera to see if I could position it hand-held at the eyepiece to record the event, but the camera's autofocus would have none of that. I then tried holding the 35mm at the low power eyepiece, and while I could see the shadowed Moon the stray light from the neighbor's yard interfered too much. While I'm sure I could have perservered with any of those issues to get some sort of through-the-scope imagery it seemed against the spirit. Lunar eclipses are events of a large scale that you're meant to appreciate in a casual context, and removing my gloves to work with cold metal in 30 degree weather to possibly have a keepsake seemed a bit too anal.

I fell back to simply taking the cam-corder and seeing what it could do. At first the autofocus acted as though it was bewildered, but then after a few moments it conceded and began to bring the Moon in and out of focus. With the telephoto mode our eclipsed satellite actually had a fair size, and at wider field it would pick up Saturn and sometimes Regulus as well. The challenge, of course, is trying to hold the recorder still, each shiver magnified as well as my subject. After about thirty minute of admiring nature's spectacle I retreated inside to see what the tale of the tape would be.

It has been a while since I've done any astrovideography - so much so that my current desktop did not have a copy of Registax on it. But first things first, reviewing the raw footage. While most of it has the Moon scooting all over the field I have fleeting moments of Gibraltar like stability from which I can make an AVI file. From there the miracle of Registax took over to fashion the image here (actually two miracles, the second being that I could work the software enough without reading the manual to produce the result - I can't wait to see what I get when I know what I'm doing!).

While I know that it's no prize winner I also can't help but be pleased with the result given the effort put in, allowing me to both enjoy the event as well as catalog it. And after all, isn't that what amateur astronomy is all about?