Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Total Lunar Eclipse


  Early this morning was the Total "Blood Moon" Lunar Eclipse, the last we'll have for three years. While I didn't want to get up for it (it bottomed out at 41° here and was partly cloudy), I did set up my Wyze V3 to do a time lapse from 3 AM to 7 AM.

 The eclipse began at 3:02 AM, reached maximum (totality) at 5:59 AM and ended as the moon set at  7:21 AM.

 I set the camera up behind the garden and aimed it high (the moon would be at an altitude of 44° as the eclipse began). The results are not good, mostly because the sky wasn't clear and partly because the full moon is too bright for the camera. But as the moon moved west and became more covered by the earth's shadow, the sky began to show more detail. In the final seconds Orion  can be gliding westward with the moon.

I shot for four hours and set the time-lapse for 20 seconds. That produced 720 frames (60x4x3) and when played back at 30 fps, it nets a 24 second video. The original MP4 is much better than the WMV I converted it for a smaller file size.  

It's not good even at  60.3M .... but here it is:


 The converted file with considerable quality loss is just 7.42M and even less interesting.

 But I didn't want to miss have something to show for the event. And that's what I got: almost nothing.




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