The full moon on the night of July 27-28, 2018, presents the longest total lunar eclipse of the 21st century (2001 to 2100). The total phase of the eclipse – called the totality – spans 1 hour 42 minutes and 57 seconds. That’s in contrast to the shortest total lunar eclipse of this century, which occurred on April 4, 2015, and lasted 4 minutes and 48 seconds. (http://earthsky.org/tonight/centurys-longest-lunar-eclipse-july-27)
This was my first attempt at taking any lunar pictures but I felt compelled to be part of this wonderful event. All pictures were taken at Bulshoekdam, 26km past Clanwilliam, a dark site.
The gear I used to capture the eclipse:-
Skywatcher EQ6 mount in Lunar tracking mode. No guiding.
Canon 6D unmodded camera.
Skywatcher ES100 F5.5 triplet refractor with field flattener.
BackyardEOS capturing software.
I also used a Canon 70-300 mm lens connected to my ZWO1600 - ( This did not work at all)
I managed to capture 470 images in jpeg (not raw) with various exposure times ranging from 1/1000 second up to 15 seconds to accommodate the brightness pf the moon at various stages of the eclipse. This was a real challenge as I was not sure what I was suppose to expect. I left ISO at 100 and only changed the exposure times.
I used autostackkert to aligned all the images. I had to manually realign the mount a few times as the lunar tracking was not perfect. I will need to figure out if it is something I did wrong or did not do. My gut feeling it could be a lot better. The realignment caused pictures to be badly aligned. Autostackkert did a decent job to fix this. (https://www.autostakkert.com/)
I then used Rawtherapee to batch crop all the aligned images. (http://rawtherapee.com/)
Virtualdub was used to create the video and again this worked very well. (https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualdub/files/)
Finally I used Handbrake to encode the video to something small enough that I could share on social media. (https://handbrake.fr/)
This was certainly not perfect and I have learned a lot from this but I was there and I captured something that I could share with you. I hope you enjoy.
