I was on my way from California to Northern Colorado to my daughters house. I had been keeping an eye on the weather for clear areas to capture the Lunar Eclipse. California was supposed to be cloudy (it ended up not as cloudy as predicted) and New Mexico was having storms, Colorado was looking bad. It looked like in general that the whole Western USA was mostly under clouds or under severe weather forecasts with 40mph+ winds. As I was looking, I found that the clouds started to clear up on the Kansas border, so I drove about 6 hours out of my way to get to Kansas. I picked out a State Park on a lake that by the map looked like it had open views to the South. It was Scott Lake State Park.
I got there past Sunset as I stopped a few times to capture the rising full moon in the Kansas landscape. But I got to the campground I had seen on the map and it was perfect!
But during the evening, I did have some less then perfect moments.
1. For the timing of the Eclipse had been looking at a chart that was showing it from LA, not from Kansas. Once I figured that out, I needed to add 2 hours to all of the times. Because of thinking I didn't have enough time to setup my regular telescope, I didn't. But by the time I realized I would have had a 2 hour window to get it set up, I no longer had that 2 hour window, so I didn't set it up.
2. The forecast had been for totally clear skies, the Weathermen lied again. I had maybe 50% clear skies with thin clouds floating in from time to time. Fortunately they were thin and never blocked the moon visually, they just veiled the moon a bit at times.
3. My Smart Telescope turned into a Dumb Telescope. I have the ZWO Seestar S50, I have had it for 1.5 years to compliment my regular Astro Rig. It does a great job of capturing the moon, and it has a timelapse feature built into it. I had it setup to capture the moon, and the display on the App on my iPhone the moon was looking beautiful. I was saving the Timelapses at about 30 minute intervals, and all was great. As the Moon was in it's Partial to Total transition, the views of the moon on my phone were perfect, so beautiful the way it covered the transition. It did a great job of it. When it got to full Totality, I went to save the Timelapse so I could do next one to cover just Totality. But instead of Saving the timelapse, the spinning wheel on the app never stopped spinning. It just kept spinning and spinning... I reset the App, as the brains of the Seestar are in the Telescope itself, not in the App. But every time I restarted the App, the same thing.
I had to be careful as I was manually triggering my Z8 that I had set up with the Tamron 50-400mm at 400mm. It was mounted on a regular tripod, so I was manually recentering the moon in the center of the frame every 5 minutes and then taking a photo. So I couldn't focus totally on the Seestar, I had to make sure to keep the Z8 keeping capturing images. In the end, I had to turn the Seestar off which obviously it lost the timelapse it had in memory, but I wanted to get it going to capture coming out of Totality. And once I restarted the Seestar, it worked like a charm again. It just had chosen the absolute worst time to glitch as that transition into Totality looked so amazing.
Fortunately the Nikon Z8 came through like a champ. I have some images processed from it, and I have put together the timelapse which I haven't totally finished.
So this is one of the images from the Nikon Z8 and Tamron 50-400mm. One nice thing about shooting wider at 400mm is that when the moon is dimmed at Totality, it's wide enough that one can pick out the surrounding stars that normally are washed out by the brightness of the moon so we never see them.
So this is a single image. It isn't a composite with 1 image for the moon and one for the stars.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
I got there past Sunset as I stopped a few times to capture the rising full moon in the Kansas landscape. But I got to the campground I had seen on the map and it was perfect!
But during the evening, I did have some less then perfect moments.
1. For the timing of the Eclipse had been looking at a chart that was showing it from LA, not from Kansas. Once I figured that out, I needed to add 2 hours to all of the times. Because of thinking I didn't have enough time to setup my regular telescope, I didn't. But by the time I realized I would have had a 2 hour window to get it set up, I no longer had that 2 hour window, so I didn't set it up.
2. The forecast had been for totally clear skies, the Weathermen lied again. I had maybe 50% clear skies with thin clouds floating in from time to time. Fortunately they were thin and never blocked the moon visually, they just veiled the moon a bit at times.
3. My Smart Telescope turned into a Dumb Telescope. I have the ZWO Seestar S50, I have had it for 1.5 years to compliment my regular Astro Rig. It does a great job of capturing the moon, and it has a timelapse feature built into it. I had it setup to capture the moon, and the display on the App on my iPhone the moon was looking beautiful. I was saving the Timelapses at about 30 minute intervals, and all was great. As the Moon was in it's Partial to Total transition, the views of the moon on my phone were perfect, so beautiful the way it covered the transition. It did a great job of it. When it got to full Totality, I went to save the Timelapse so I could do next one to cover just Totality. But instead of Saving the timelapse, the spinning wheel on the app never stopped spinning. It just kept spinning and spinning... I reset the App, as the brains of the Seestar are in the Telescope itself, not in the App. But every time I restarted the App, the same thing.
I had to be careful as I was manually triggering my Z8 that I had set up with the Tamron 50-400mm at 400mm. It was mounted on a regular tripod, so I was manually recentering the moon in the center of the frame every 5 minutes and then taking a photo. So I couldn't focus totally on the Seestar, I had to make sure to keep the Z8 keeping capturing images. In the end, I had to turn the Seestar off which obviously it lost the timelapse it had in memory, but I wanted to get it going to capture coming out of Totality. And once I restarted the Seestar, it worked like a charm again. It just had chosen the absolute worst time to glitch as that transition into Totality looked so amazing.
Fortunately the Nikon Z8 came through like a champ. I have some images processed from it, and I have put together the timelapse which I haven't totally finished.
So this is one of the images from the Nikon Z8 and Tamron 50-400mm. One nice thing about shooting wider at 400mm is that when the moon is dimmed at Totality, it's wide enough that one can pick out the surrounding stars that normally are washed out by the brightness of the moon so we never see them.
So this is a single image. It isn't a composite with 1 image for the moon and one for the stars.
All comments are welcome,
Jim
