Tag: moon

Lunar eclipse and my new camera

I got up early this morning to watch the lunar eclipse. In Denmark only partial eclipse was visible since the moon went down already at around 7:40 UTC where I live. Unfortunately, it was cloudy so I didn’t even see the partial eclipse. Too bad because it seems that my new Fuji HS10 camera with 30x optical zoom is quite well suited for taking photos of the moon without any telescope. I took this photo of the full moon yesterday evening while trying to find some proper settings for capturing the eclipse

Full Moon (cropped)

Not bad for a 500€ camera, is it? More photos here. I got the camera about a week and I didn’t have much time to get acquainted with it so I expect the pictures will improve as time goes.

The camera has some pretty neat high speed video recording modes which was one of the reasons I bought it.

More Moon with a webcam

Here is my latest attempt in my Moon with a Webcam series, though this time I used a very cheap camcorder instead of a webcam. Still plenty of room for improvement.

I used a Meade ETX-90 telescope f=1250mm with 26mm eyepiece → 48X magnification. This time I was holding the camera by hand but I have a plan for improving that part.

The Moon on Blue Sky

I caught the moon tonight right after sunset while the sky was still blue. Here is a video I recorded using my JVC Everio GZ-MG130E video camera. I didn’t use any telescope, just the camera zoom. It can do up to 32x optical zoom and something like 800x digital zoom. The highest zoom on this video is around 40x

Recorded: 6 April 2009 around 20:00 CET – Place: Copenhagen, Denmark (10th floor)

The Moon with a Webcam

I am working on a setup where I want to mount a cheap webcam onto my Meade ETX-90 telescope for terrestrial observations. While I was working on the setup the other night I looked out the window and saw the Moon behind a tree. Without thinking too much I pointed the telescope towards the Moon and recorded this video.

As for the bad quality keep in mind that:

  • it was recorded through a double-glas window (which was dirty)
  • the Moon was behind a tree
  • it was recorded with a webcam

The Sky on the Moon

Do you even wonder how the sky might look like from the surface of the Moon? I certainly did so recently and here is what I learned…

We had some discussions on the Team FREDNET public forum about using the stars and the planets for guidance and navigation on lunar surface. Of course, it raised the question of how the sky looks like on the Moon? To find out, I took a virtual trip to the Apollo 11, 15 and Surveyor 7 landing sites using the free open source Stellarium software for linux.

Stellarium is a complete planetarium software for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It even allows you to look at the sky from surface of other planets and moons.

Other free software used in producing this video was the Gimp for image manipulations and Kdenlive for non-linear video editing.

PS: I have hidden a small error in the first 20 seconds of the video, and I am not thinking about the lulnar landscape. Can you find it?