Lunar Eclipse

Well last night there was a lunar eclipse! The P's had given us a "head's up" a few days before that something was going to happen, but we honestly weren't sure (didn't have much success initially trying to google to find when it would take place in Egypt as no newspapers ran the story until the day before - typical Egypt - so I tried looking at some complicated maps and charts.....). Finally we located something and figured out that about an hour after sunset it would kick off. Just before dinner the sun was setting but we weren't sure where the moon would be in the sky so we had a quick look out of the windows which cover about 260degrees. No sign.....hmmm maybe we'll have to go out to the wasteland by the satelites to see it. After dinner though we spied the moon - great uninterrupted view from the balcony off the living room. Brilliant! So we set up our camera for some still pics (jobby fixed to the deck chair) and then the video camera too (tripod in the flowers).

Our set-up

It took a while to get the cameras set up and then we were taking photos every 30 seconds to try and get a time lapse thing going on. This was sort of the conversation at one point during the set up....

Allstar 1: "Look. This really isn't working. The stand keeps slipping"
Allstar 2: "Really? Oh" :(
Allstar 1: "Yes. Look I try and line the moon up in the middle of the screen, but then it slips and it's off into the corner"
Allstar 2: "Right. Well the moon is moving. It's rising in the sky."
Allstar 1: "Oh"

Problem solved (we just had to move the camera every now and then to reposition that darn moon that wouldn't keep still!) We took loads of photos as the earth moved in front of the moon. The light off the moon was really bright, so it was hard to see the rest of its outline at times.Once it got to the beading stage and the last of the try light disapeared it was easier to see the moon again which now was a kind of brown.  At this point we saw that the colour of the moon wasn't too far off the colour it can be when the sunlight on it is coming through the heavy pollution of Cairo!

Just 20 minutes later though and we start getting some real "red moon" shots like this one:

Creating the time-lapse video has taken ages.  Each image needed to be cropped and the moon centred on the screen so that when all the shots were put together (and there were 140 of them) they would flow easily between each other and not have the moon jumping around the frame.  There are some exposure jitters as the eclipse approached totality, but overall I don't think it's a bad first attempt at doing this sort of thing.