Lunar Eclipse - What worked ... and what didn't.

As always with an event like this which you can't fully rehearse some things work well ... and others not so much:

1, Closeups with Lunar Eclipse Maestro

• Setup of the scope (SkyGuider, polar alignment...) worked perfectly
• Lunar Eclipse Maestro worked well, but somewhere during the maximum, it stopped taking images - luckily I caught this and restarted it.
• I wish Lunar Eclipse Maestro would have taken two images at once - one for the bright and one for the dark part of the moon. HDR compositions might have looked really great!
• For both this and the timelapse, having the Nikon's directly powered by a 12V battery was perfect (though the batter was pretty much flat at the end of the night powering the cameras, and the laptop).

2. Timelapse

• It didn't work as a timelapse at all - the moon was just a really, really bright spot - and then less bright. But there were no details of the moon or such.
• It gave me that awesome Milky Way image - I love that.
• Somehow my field of view calculations were all wrong. The moon only went through half of the image. I.e. I could have shot at 24mm focal length - maybe that would have made a difference.

3. Unistellar eVscope

• Setting the eVscope up was as always a breeze.
• One of the tablets didn't have the latest eVscope software and couldn't connect (we had really poor reception up there)
• The images had a strong pink taint:
  
  
  
  

  It was easy enough to process that out by adjusting the whitebalance. But for live observing we had live with a pink moon.
  
  

4. Manual Widescapes

• As always, these are some of my favorites. Just walking around, trying different angles, exposures, focal length...
• Our spot was almost too perfect! I didn't have any objects (trees or such) that I could put in the foreground.

Lunar Eclipse

On the evening of May 25, Renate and I got ready - after all those preparations. All the cameras and equipment were in the car, hot chocolate, Twix Bars, Chips, water, Beef Jerky ... and warm clothes. We drove up to Lick Observatory (which is still closed due to the Covid-19). But finding a place wasn't easy. Most places where I was before had some obstruction (telescope, trees) to the south west. We drove a little bit down and found a perfect spot: someones driveway - with a big "No Parking" sign! But it was almost midnight and we hoped that whoever lived there wouldn't want to leave until 6am...

We set everything up, configured and started the Eclipse Maestro and qDslrDashboard timelapse ... and then enjoyed the event!

And took some great images:

The moon half eclipsed - crazy brightness difference!

Various phases of the eclipse.

This is how the moon looked through the eVscope (though I had to color correct it).

The moon was in Scorpius. Once it wasn't super bright anymore, you could see the stars of Scorpius. The bright, red star to the left is Antares.

The Moon, Scorpius and Silicon Valley.

More images with the Moon and Silicon Valley. These are why I went up Mt. Hamilton!!!

And finally it was dark enough to see the Milky Way too!

And with the sunrise this awesome event came to an end.

Took lots of notes what worked and what didn't.

Lunar Eclipse Imaging - Prep

Finally, an eclipse again - this time a lunar eclipse. I planned early and ended up preparing 4 different ways to image it:

1. Closeup - using a tracker and Lunar Eclipse Maestro
2. Ultra wide angle timelapse
3. With the Unistellar eVscope
4. Manual widescapes

Turned out that I had a lot to prepare:

1. Closeup
The first challenge was that Lunar Eclipse Maestro only runs on MacOS and not beyond Mojave. But Xavier Jubier (the author) told me that I can run it in a VM.

Enter VirtualBox from Oracle. Luckily I found great instructions on how to install MacOS Mojave on VirtualBox. Beyond that I had to:

• Pass the required USB ports to the VM. Which is fairly easy, you have to connect the USB devices and then select those devices to be available in the VM.
  Note: DON'T select the external hard drive that runs the VM or the keyboard USB ports here!!!
• The time on MacOS was constantly off. I had to install guest additions to fix that. Also, the calendar was by default set to "Persian" - had to change it to "Gregorian".

Not being able to use my TOA-130 scope (I couldn't image the eclipse from our backyard but ended up driving up to Lick Observatory) I borrowed a 500mm lens from borrowlenses.com. And that was way too heavy for my Vixen Polarie. So, I ended up upgrading to an iOptron SkyGuider. The fast and accurate polar alignment using an iPolar and the load limit made it a great fit.

Figuring out the SkyGuider was a breeze (though first I received one where the iPolarie wasn't focused properly which made polar alignment impossible).  Having a counterweight and a sturdy ballhead was great for stability. I kind of wish that there was a mobile version of the polar alignment software - that would make the SkyGuider even more portable. Though most of the time when I take tracked images, I have a laptop with me anyway.

As always, battery power of the Nikon's concerned me: the batteries probably wouldn't last the entire night and I would need to remember to change them. A couple of months ago, I tried out the power supplies from Pegasus Astro. But they failed to power the D750 cameras (it worked on the D7000). When I tried these out again, I connected one of them directly to a 12V battery (by accident!) and ... it worked!!! Seems like the power of the power supplies from Pegasus Astro isn't powerful enough for the D750. But that was great. I purchased another batter coupler and could not power both Nikon's from the 12V battery!

Setting everything up in our backyard.

2. Wide angle

As so often, I wanted to take a timelapse using the 14-24mm Nikkor lens. I wanted to start the timelapse at midnight and end when the moon sets at 6am. In this time, the moon moves from 151° Azimuth / 22° Altitude to 243° / 0° = 90° horizontal and 22° vertical. Using a field of view calculator, the D750 covers 90° horizontal and 67° vertical at 18mm focal length. So, I'll use that.

As the brightness will change significantly (lunar eclipse and dawn) I will use the "holy grail" function of qDslrDashboard to adjust the exposure time and ISO automatically. As always, I will use the LRTimelapse Pro Timer for shooting.

3. Unistellar eVscope
Being able to watch the eclipse up close on a tablet should be convenient. Especially when it will be cold and we can do it from inside the warm car!

4. Manual Widescapes
Finally, I will use my 135mm and the 85-300mm lens for manually composing and shooting. Just using a tripod and remote shutter.

ΔT and UTC data for 10Micron Mount

 I used to download the ΔT and UTC data from the US Naval Observatory (USNO) server (maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7). But that was shutdown some time ago.

Took me a while to find an alternative, but they can be downloaded from this NASA server: https://cddis.nasa.gov/archive/products/iers/. It requires registration (for free!) but always has the latest data.

• finals.data
• tai-utc.data