May 15th Lunar Eclipse
Steve Taylor shot this image of the May 15th, 2003 Lunar Eclipse using a Canon F-1 with a 400mm lens and 2x convertor.
LUNAR ECLIPSE MAY 15, 2003
Jim Melka photographed the May 15, 2003 Lunar Eclipse from his hotel room while vacationing with his family in Indianapolis Indiana. Skies were clear but with heavy light pollution. The pictures were taken with a Canon D60 digital SLR camera on a tripod using an 80mm lens and a speed setting of ISO 200. The camera was used in Manual mode. Shutter speeds were respectively 1/60th , 1/60th , 1/30th and 4.0 seconds. The first photo was taken about the time of first contact of the umbra shadow. Note the 5.5 magnitude star directly below the totally eclipsed Moon in the last photo was later occulted by the Moon.
Dan Howard shot this photograph of the partial eclipse on June 10, at 20:12 CDT, Using a Meade 8" LX90 with a Thousand Oaks filter. It was taken on Kodak Gold 200 film at 1/250 sec using a Nikon F3 at Prime focus.
SLAS Members Film Moon occulting
Saturn
Mark Jones and Jim Melka filmed the occultation of Saturn by the Moon on Feb. 20, 2002. They used the afocal method of astrophotography. Mark's Sony Hi-8mm camcorder was mounted above a 16-mm eyepiece on Jim's clock-driven 12 1/2-inch Newtonian reflector. The camera's zoom lens was used to magnify the image of Saturn to a size allowable by the seeing conditions. Focusing was done by rotating the helical-threaded eyepiece holder. The skies were mostly cloudy during the immersion of Saturn behind the dark limb of the Moon and improved to partly cloudy during emmersion. The immersion began only about 12 minutes after sunset, so the sky was still very bright at this time.
Mark
used a special circuit card called a "frame grabber" in his computer
to digitize individual frames from the video tape. Each picture shows the
local Central Standard Time. The first three pictures were taken during the
immersion, the last three pictures show two during the emmersion and one a
"blended" image from two images 5 seconds apart after the occultation.
Jim used 'Picture Window 2.5' to enhance the images.
