(Lunar Eclipse)

Last night we had a total of 5 HAL members including myself.
I got at Alpha ridge park at 8:30 pm to start getting ready, and the rest of the attendees arrived at 11 pm.

We enjoyed a beautiful night with some light clouds every now and then but nothing that affected our imaging or viewing of the moon.

The temperatures dropped to the 38 F while we were there, but it was not windy so it didn’t impact us significantly.

As for the event, all 5 of us imaged the moon and the eclipse, mostly closeups but Danielle was also shooting a panoramic composition.

I believe it was a first time for most of us imaging the moon with our rigs so we learned a lot about the obstacles and work arounds for our specific rigs on such a bright object.

Cheryl used her Seestar S30, Luis used his Vespera, I do not remember what was Shrikant’s rig, and the same for Danielle but I think they were using either telephoto lenses or small refractors combined with DSLRs. I also enjoyed viewing the eclipse with a new pair of Nikon 10×50 binoculars I grabbed at Dick’s Sporting Goods before heading there. They worked so well for me that I would actually recommend them as they are affordable and well made.

We decided to wrap it up by 3:45 am because it started to get cloudy once the totality started to pass, and I closed the gate by 4 am.

Thankfully we ran into no issues, but the park rangers also checked and made sure the park was empty before I arrived.

This was a good experience to me on how to handle impromptu events when there are special and highly advertised events like this one.

I am leaving you with two of my images I quick saved last night, but I will be working on the other ones this weekend and I’ll share the results with you when that is done.

I used my Apertura Carbonstar 150 with ZWO ASI533mc pro, a neutral density filter before the eclipse with 0.01 second exposure, and gain 10. For the eclipsed state I actually used my dual narrow band filter as it helped me keep the red hue of the moon, and I shot at 50 gain and 1 second exposure.

My telescope has 6” aperture with 590mm focal length so I had to use those settings to se anything other than an overexposed light bulb. I hope to get more detail after stacking or working on better frames.

I look forward to see everyone’s images.

Jose Urias