Eclipse! Posted 2/21/08

A beautiful full lunar eclipse took place on this night starting at around 9:00PM Eastern time with totality taking place from 10:00PM-10:52PM. Poor transparency was predicted but it was nice and clear when I went out at around 10:00PM. I took this shot using my ST8 CCD camera which is not ideal for moon shots since it saturates very quickly. I usually can only manage a moon shot with super short exposures and at long focal lengths using an HA filter to cut down much of the light. This gives only grayscale since no filter other than HA is dark enough to prevent saturation of the chip. I really should be using a web cam or better yet a DSLR for this kind of thing. It's an uncommon treat to be able to use the CCD to take a color moon image! Next eclipse is in 2010 so I'm glad I was able to get this one in.