Heads up - Partial luna eclipse, June 26th (NZ, Eastern Australia and South Pacific)

[Rodders]

Hello all,

There will be a Partial Luna eclipse (when the full Moon passes through Earth's shadow) this Saturday night (26th June 2010).

It will only be visable from all of New Zealand, the Eastern 2/3 of Australia and parts of the South Pacific. The eclipse times are as follows (shown in NZ time):

Penumbral eclipse begins: 8:56pm (Saturday)
Umbral eclipse begins: 10:17pm

Maximum eclipse: 11:39pm

Umbral eclipse ends: 1:00am (Sunday)
Penumbral eclipse ends: 2:21am

As you can see above, there are two shadows. The Penumbra is the fuzzy edge of the Earth's shadow and the Umbra is the dark central shadow. At maximun eclipse, just over 50% of the Moon's diameter will be inside the Umbra. Although it is not a full eclipse this time, it will still make for some great photo's - weather permitting

Note: The eclipse maybe hard to spot for the first half-hour or so.

To give you a rough idea of what you may see at its peak, I took the photo below a few years ago during a total luna eclipse (although at this stage it was not at its total phase).




When the above shot was taken, the Moon was well over half-way into the umbra (dark central shadow), however due to refracted light from our atmosphere, the Moon still gets some light in the form of a nice red glow.

I hope this post has been of some interest and I look forward to seeing any photo's you may get (if the weather is kind to you)

[Klickit]

Thanks for the reminder, Rod. I saw this somewhere recently but it had completely dropped from my tiny mind. Weather isn't looking particularly bright in our area at the moment, but it could well change by Saturday night. Will be watching!

[Steve H]

Hey Rodney, Great info - thanks for that. I've always been interested in astronomy and in particular astro-photography (expensive hobbies). Can you please share with us your setup/procedure for the shot above?

I'll take a look on Saturday night too but with snow on the ground outside now clear skies are doubtful, hopefully the Southerly will blow it all through.

[Rodders]

Hey Rodney, Great info - thanks for that. I've always been interested in astronomy and in particular astro-photography (expensive hobbies). Can you please share with us your setup/procedure for the shot above?

I'll take a look on Saturday night too but with snow on the ground outside now clear skies are doubtful, hopefully the Southerly will blow it all through.

Hello Steve,

Yes, our bad weather at present could play a role at the weekend.

For me, astronomy has been a great hobby and it is here that I first got into photograghy a few years back. Your not wrong, astrophotography can be very expensive, however my setup was pretty basic (as far as astrophotography goes) and it allowed me to image many of the brighter objects in the night sky.

The photo above was a 1s exposure @ ISO1600. The camera used is my canon 20d and the lens was a 600mm F/7.5 refractor telescope and the two were connected together using a t-mount adaptor. The down side to using a telescope as a lens is that there is no auto focus and as you can tell from my photo, it is not as sharp as it should be.
The other major problem with the photo was the ISO1600. looking back, I should have tried to make it a longer exposure at a lower ISO just to reduce the noise.

At the time, the telescope was setup on a computerized equatoral mount/tripod to compensate for the earths rotation, however I don't see any reason why you could not take this shot with a long tele-photo lens on a normal tripod. Fair enough, the moon is moving (or rather, the earth is spinning), however it is only very slow movement so blur shouldn't be a big problem (depending on the focal length of the lens of course).

As far as procedure goes, its just a case of trial and error to find the correct exposure (keeping in mind that the light levels are forever changing)

I hope this has helped.

[Rodders]

As I was saying before, the above photo was a 1 sec exposure. To give you an idea of how much light can be lost during an eclipse, the moon photo below is a 1/3200 exp (at ISO1600 also).

[Rodders]

I have tracked down a detailed pdf map showing where the eclipse will be visable from. As you can see, there are other countries that will be able to see some of the eclipse.

http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OHfi...2010-Fig02.pdf

Cheers

[Steve H]

Thanks very much Rod for your detailed response - much appreciated. My longest lens is only 200mm and no TC's so probably not a starter for photography tonight, although I do have nifty pair of Canon 15x50 stabilised bino's so i'll have a gander with them if the skies clear (doubtful at this stage - pea soup at moment).

At the risk of sounding stupid... it always amazes me that we only ever see one side of the moon. Is it really absolutely stationary as in 'no spin' or is it that it spins exactly once every 24 hours so we only ever see the 'bright side'? I can't get my head around that.

[Rodders]

As I always say to anyone who asks a question regarding space/astronomy, there is no such thing as a stupid question!

Although we see the moon in the sky on a regular basis, many people do not appreciate how unique it is (not meant to sound horrible).
You're correct, the moon does spin however it is "tidally locked" and only spins once on its axis once every 29.5 days which is also the same amount of time it takes to orbit once around the earth. This is why we only get see the one side of it.
There is no dark side to it as such, when it (from our perspective) is at its new moon stage, the far side is in fact is fully lit by the sun. The Russian's were the first to see and photograph the far side of the moon during the space race of the 60s and because of the all the craters and features on that side have Russian names.

Another interesting point is its size and distance of the moon relative to the sun. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun but coincidentally it is 400 times closer. Because of this they both appear the same size in the sky. Although the earth-moon distace does vary (360,000 - 405,000kms) there does come times when the moon will block out the sun perfectly (solar eclipse) and if the moon was any further away or too close, we would not see this event.
Scientests believe the moon use to be part of the earth. The theory goes, a large object (approx the size of Mars) crashed into the earth back in its early formation days. The result was a lot of debis in orbit around our planet which coalesced over time forming the moon.

A few other interesting facts:

The first Amercian flag was placed too close to the Eagle lander and it was knocked over by the take-off blast when the Apollo 11 crew left.
No other planet in our solar system has as larger moon as we do (relative to the planets size).
The moon is moving away from us at an average distance of 4cm per year. Its safe to say it will be there for a while yet
With a daimeter of approx 3,500km, the moon is approx 1/4 the size of the earth and has only 1/6th the gravity.

I hope this has been of interest.

[Steve H]

I hope this has been of interest.

Yes - very much so, thanks mate! What I find amazing is the moon spin rate equalling exactly the orbit time around the Earth. I mean what are the chances of that happening from the original 'big bang', or is it something to do with the respective masses and thats how they found their equilibrium (or is it the red wine )?

Still fogbound here near the lake so probably no show tonight....
Cheers.

[Steaphany]

I beat the New Zealand crowd, here is my shot of the Lunar Eclipse taken from Texas !!



Here is the Moon photographed during the June 26, 2010 Lunar Eclipse at 10:59:52 UT from my North Texas ranch, Location 98º 28' 35"W 33º 13' 32" N 386m with my Sigma SD14 through my Orion 1250mm ( 90mm Ø ) Maksutov Cassegrain, f/13.9, Shutter 1 Second, ISO 100.

The Moon was just 4° 16' 23" above the horizon, only 28 minutes before setting, and 39 before the eclipse achieved the greatest coverage.

This image has up oriented towards the Zenith with a field of view of 0.95° x 0.63°.

[Colin Southern]

This is the best I could come up with



... Darn clouds!

[arith]

Cool photo Steaphany.