The evening of Wednesday 8th October 2014 promised a Lunar Eclipse, accordingly the monthly meeting of “Sydney City Sky Watchers” was delayed by two days and plans were made for a combined meeting and observing session. The meeting was at the usual venue: Sydney Observatory.
The equipment I prepared was my compact Celestron 4GT telescope, Canon 5Dmkii camera and a whopping 56cm (22″) video monitor. This is the second public astronomy event where I have used this setup, the plan is to show on screen the event of interest, many people can watch the same event and being able to point at the monitor is very helpful in talking about the event.
If that was the plan, then the reality was that once again we were competing with clouds to get the odd peek of the eclipse, this time the cloud was on multiple levels, all travelling in different directions. Still the viewing was a modest success, many people did get to see various stages of the eclipse. Having a live feed from Los Angeles (Griffith Observatory) was also helpful. Here are some photos from the event, also some more pics taken after the event from home of the partial end stages of the eclipse, please realise that photographing the moon presents an impossible range of contrast, some of the moon is in full sunlight, other parts are in diffuse shadow.
This photo represents the best views we had of the early stages of the eclipse:
Occasionally the clouds parted and we saw this:
While these are a series of photos of the latter stages of the eclipse, taken at various exposures:
LunarPhotoOfTheDay
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Lunar Eclipse – 28th July 2018
From Sydney this longest lunar eclipse of the century progress from very early morning till after moonset. Weather forecasts were not very encouraging, nor was the initial experience with the moon already half eclipsed at 04:55 and this variable cloud cover:
Miraculously the cloud cleared and remained clear for the next hour with these images:
At which time a thick bank of cloud, low on the western horizon prevented further sightings.