VALDOSTA – Last night the blood moon was in full bloom.
Adel native, Richard Taylor, set up his camera/telescope (Meade ETX105 and
Canon T2i) and bundled up in the freezing temps late last night and early this morning to both view, and capture, this rare event.
“What an awesome night. Little cold, but a lot of fun,” Taylor wrote. “One of my dreams came true around Christmas, a good friend gave me his old telescope.”
“I had been planning to shoot this eclipse with my camera, so my focus changed to getting this scope running with my camera,” Taylor wrote. “Long story, but have learned that it is not as easy as it looks.
When the scope is tracking, it allows you to do long exposures without the image being blurred. This is 1.3 seconds at ISO 100
After a dozen or so different configurations trying to get the magnification low enough so that the whole moon would fit in the camera frame, Taylor wound up making a bracket that holds the camera directly on the rear port of the scope. Literally an hour before the eclipse started, Taylor found out that the moon would fit, with no room to spare.
This is the same shot as above at a 20 second shutter. Big difference.
“We could not get the scope tracking perfect,” Taylor wrote. “So every picture had to be manually adjusted to make it fit.”
Taylor’s friend that gave him the scope came over, and they sat in the front yard for hours in 28 degree wind and “had a blast.”
This is how tight the moon was in the camera frame
“It was so cold my phone battery crapped out,” Taylor said. “My wife’s hot spiced wine helped things.”
They were able to control both the telescope and camera from Taylor’s laptop, so that made it a lot easier.
Another Adel native, Mark Flowers, contributed the shot below.
