Therefore, the total lunar eclipse was the prime target earlier this morning, it's the longest total lunar eclipse for the century. I came home after working and slept nearly immediately to prepare myself to wake up for this event.
The sky was not promising, one word says it all: misty. When I woke up after less than two hour of sleep, it didn't improve a bit... luckily, the moon and the bright Mars were still visible through the mist or thin cloud.
Encouraged, I pulled out my 85ED and mounted it on my Nexstar mount, in the hope to capture some high power shots with my ASI 120mc.
Took two clips but none of them was stackable, so I posted the raw video as below. The exposure and gain were both very high, yielding very low frame rate:
Since the mount was occupied, I took this with a Canon 100-400mm hand-held using spot metering, 0246 (GMT+8):
And then a wide field shot, 0248 (GMT+8):
Manual exposure was used to keep the exposure fast enough not to overexpose the lunar disc too much.
And then this one at 0318 (GMT+8):-
And a quick closer up 0323 (GMT+8), to show the red hue:-
And then things got worse, I have to use GOTO to the moon! Can you see the moon in this shot? I am sure not! The shot below also told you how close the moon to a nearby new building.
But you know, when there's nothing, there's really nothing there! I pulled out my 10x30 and checked with my eyes, nothing. 5 seconds exposure? nothing.
When you were about the give up, I realized that I could just close the window and sit in an air conditioned room to wait, so why not? After some wait and hey... was it a cloud or what? no, it's the moon! taken at 0409 (GMT+8)
The Mars was way brighter than the moon by then, not unexpected, right?
04:22 (GMT+8), probably the best eclipse shot of the night, stars could be seen around the moon, clearest moment of the night. I could imagine such a totality would be wonderful under a dark cloudless night! But hey, we could only imagine as a Hong Kong observer!
04:25 (GMT+8), and the Canon 100-400mm got the mount now, I checked the EXIF and it was at 200mm, a zoom lens could be nice for this purpose, you could frame your shot the way you liked:-
And a shorter exposure one at 0426 (GMT+8):-
I tried to get a close up but it was shaky, since the cloud was getting thick resulting in longer exposure. The cloud window was closed.
Alright, time to sleep. Luckily, it was Saturday in the next morning so I could sleep longer to make up the observation time.
Finally, a few slash back shots:
First up were two mobile phone shots while going home, before the eclipse:
This shot with a historical building in the front, should be taken as layers and merged back, but I got no time to do so.
Equipment shots, of course, taken during cloud cover, just a record. The new ES diagonal is nice.
And finally, the Canon 100-400mm lens on the Nexstar:
Sorry that I (very rarely these years) bought new equipment these weeks, and still got some in transit, weather curse applied.
A short summary in Chinese: 香港天文，注定有雲 (Hong Kong astronomy, cloudy astronomy)
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