Some images of Lunar eclipse from Barcelona

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, not bad for a scope with 2 collimatable mirrors, 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
www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/58422...es/o/in/photostream/

Moon, with a small edge in the penumbra, note the star to the lower left,
I think its HP86515 and mag 7.9
www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/58422...es/l/in/photostream/

The Moon nearly half out of the Umbra.
www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/58428...et-72157626983044102

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

for more see,
www.flickr.com/photos/61288385@N00/sets/72157626983044102/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.

Great shots there Dave. Sounds like a very worthwhile trip.
The moon did get very dark.I could barely see it at all and had a major job trying to focus on it as it was invisible through the camera. I needed a 4 second shot at ISO 1600 to record anything also but couldn't go above 6-8 seconds without trailing as it wasn't tracking.

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 with them.


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

well in fairness Malaga was always an exaggeration, but 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, there was Zaragoza. I've been there before, its like something out of starwars from a few miles out, a city surrounded by desert.
I did some serious driving in northern Spain a few years back, their motorway system is superb.
I was there to see the eclipse, networking is at a distant and expendable second place.

John, your exposure times were in the same order of what I had to do, what scope did you use for that?
The focusing system I have here on the MK67 is abit unusual, as described in the first post, once the mirrors dont move it'll always hold, not counting for big swings in temperature. Given that I could barely see the moon through the finder, it was as good a focus point as any. No way could I have focused it on location during the eclipse. Its not every eclipse you can get a mag 7.9 star in the same field of view as the moon.
This setup has proven itself and will be my solar eclipse scope from now on.

Lovely shots Dave. That was a dark eclipse then. I had a hard enough time finding it rising at the beginning of the partial phase from Donegal with the bright evening twilight. Once again, great shots Dave. You really captured a lot of details and the colour looks good too. Well done.