In preparation of LPI’s event at the George Observatory, I took our Celestron 8-inch telescope home to make sure it was in good working order. While I had it out on my patio, I connected my Canon 7D and got a few nice pictures of the first quarter moon. The field of view is small enough that it takes at least two photos, stitched together, to show the entire surface of the moon.

Close-up of the terminator (line between day and night), Mare Serenitatus (top dark area), Mare Tranquilitatus (middle dark area), and Mare Crisium (small dark area on the bottom right)

I had gotten an adapter to connect my camera to the Celestron 8-inch telescope the LPI Education group has, but I didn’t take into account how long the adapter was and how high the moon would be in the sky during the eclipse.  The adapter kept hitting the stand and I couldn’t even attach my camera, so I had to rig it where the tripod legs of the telescope were sticking out to the side of the telescope and my camera tripod was shoved underneath the telescope stand holding it up.  This way the entire telescope was leaning and my camera was free of the telescope stand.  Because it was rigged and leaning, I couldn’t use the tracking of the telescope, so I had to move it manually as the Moon traveled across the sky during the night, which made it much more of an interactive event than I had planned.

Another issue was the cloud cover.  We had spotty clouds that got thicker and thicker as the night went on.  By the time the Moon was in totality and bright red, there were a few intermittent holes in the clouds to view it, and that was it.  My field of view in the telescope was so small that it took four to six pictures to cover the entire surface of the Moon, and there just wasn’t enough time in the small holes in the clouds to get the shots during totality.  So, I gave up using the telescope and just used the long end of my 70-300mm lens, so the red Moon pictures aren’t as high resolution, but they still came out nicely.

Totality!