Well I was up until 1:30am or so preparing my Canon T1i DSLR and my Brandon 80mm Apochromatic refractor for some lunar eclipse photos. Went to sleep for about an hour and a half in spite of the excitement. I was able to drift off to sleep in confidence, knowing my gear was ready and the Clear Dark Sky Clock reported the sky would be clear - great! 3am - I pop out of bed at the first chime of my cell phone alarm, throw on a coat and hat and have the tripod mounted camera / refractor assembly on the deck in under 3 minutes - and what do I see? CLOUDS! Arghhh! I watch with futile hope, thinking those pockets of clear sky cloud gaps where I can occasionally see a couple stars would expose the eclipsed moon in it's beautiful orange-brown state. But nooooo - the sky only teased me with a very occasional porthole of a partial clearing. A quick snap was all I could get. Maybe 2 or 3 on one or two tries when the gap would permit.
Well in spite of the conditions, I did manage to snap around 20 or so shots at various stages after totality. I transferred them to my laptop and took a peek with iPhoto. Hmmm - pretty bleak for the shots. Very little info was there, but whatever amount there was, I tweaked within iPhoto and actualy wound up with16 decent images - not magazine quality mind you, but good enough to post on the web ;-) Here's one just for grins..
It really is quite amazing what you can do with the simplest image editing software to coax out detail that would otherwise be invisible. This shot and the others (which I posted in the lower online album shown at the right edge of this page) were at best, covered by some degree of clouds for the whole hour and a half during which I stayed up - waiting for even a tiny break. If you want to see all 16 shots, you can go to http://picasaweb.google.com/donnwms/LunarEclipse122110#. Well maybe next time the weather will be a little more cooperative. Hopefully you had better luck at your spot on the globe ;-) In any case, Merry Christmas!
Peace & blessings,
Donn (aka The Astro Monk)
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