Some Lunar Eclipse images from Barcelona

[Dave Lillis]

Hi,
We had a swelteringly hot flyby visit to Barcelona. After a tour of the city by committee members of Aster, we attended a club meeting where there was a TV crew from the Barcelona TV station. After that we had a meal and headed up to the observing site.
The first 45mins of the Moon over the horison was missed due to slight horison haze and the fact that the Moon was very dim.
I used a 6" Rumak Maksutov (intes MK67) and a Canon300D with a 644 Meade flipmirror, this way I could image it and view it (24mm panoptic) without changing over equipment or refocusing, the tripod had a tracking motor on it.

I have modified this scope so that focusing is performed by rotating one thread along another (no crayford focuer here), I had previously setup the focus point using the Moon here in Ireland and locked with with a locking ring. I brought along allen keys for recollimating incase the flight knocked it out. Amazingly the collimation and focus were perfect when I put the scope together onsite in Barcelona, you just go to love Russian engineered scopes !!

To give an idea of how dim the Moon was in the umbra, I had to use iso1600 and a 5 second exposure to get any kind of an image. Once the Moon was in the penumbra I could use iso400 and 1/200th of a second exposure.
So here are the best of the images I got...

Moon fully in Penumbra, a few minutes after mid totality
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

Moon, with a small edge in the penumbra, note the star to the lower left,
I think its HP86515 and mag 7.9
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... otostream/

The Moon nearly half out of the Umbra.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... 6983044102

Once the moon was fully in the umbra, it was slightly dimmer then a normal full Moon.

for more see,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N ... 4102/show/

The moon was extremely faint, the darkest eclipse I've seen. the observing site was at MontJuic, next to the olympic stadium. Many members of ASTER (Barcelona Astronomical Association) were there and the general public numbered into the several hundreds.
Many thanks ot the ASTER group for helping us and for the tour of the city earlier that day. Also many thanks to the Fabra Observatory the next day, what a way to finish off the trip.

P.S. many thanks Tom for helping me out with those weights and the camera, there was no way I'd have got that onto the plane, I was already carrying 27kgs with me between handluggage and the cargo hold bag.

[Tom Walsh]

My pleasure to be your man servant for this trip Mr Dave.

[Frank Ryan]

Nice shots Dave.
Ya.
Pere in ASTER came good, as did Antonio in Fabra.
I'm glad now that I arranged for us
to meet up them.


So, Dave, if it was cloudy would you
still have driven to Malaga like you were
saying you'd do?

[Dave Lillis]

well, I had a look at a map before we left on Monday, if the weather was bad, I would have had a look at the weather and looked up Tarragona, Valencia, Alicante, they're all on the same costal motorway to the south.
No way was I missing this eclipse, Ive seen my fair share of bright eclipses, I wanted to see a dark one, and this one been nearly as dark as it can get.

You'd do Alicante in about 3-4 hours, any further south would be hard going as you have the drive back up aswell to consider.
IF west was better then there was Zaragoza. Ive been there before, its like something out of starwars from a few miles out, a city surrounded by desert.

As it was we missed about a third of the umbra eclipse, but hey I still count this a success.

I think from now on, I'll have to read the small print about the exact plan of action on these trips interms of what we're doing before the main event when we're there.

[Frank Ryan]

Exactly,
the primary goal needs to be the event.
not the social aspect (as in meeting other clubs)
Its nice & all but wr have to be carefull how we
aproach it.