bladefixation2
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- Mar 28, 2004
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For anyone that missed it or was under a cloud, we just had an amazing view of the total lunar eclipse.
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Lunar Eclipse
- Thread starter bladefixation2
- Start date
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- Feb 8, 2006
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- 429
I actually found the eclipse on my Stellarium software a couple days ago. It's free and extremely cool software. www.stellarium.org I even took pictures of my back yard, where I set my telescope, and have my back yard rendered in the software, all to perfect scale. You can put in your latitude and longitude and elevation coordinates and get extremely precise sighting info. I knew that at 7:31pm, the moon would clear my neighbor's roof, and that the moon would look red and be about 3/4 covered. It was dead nuts. It also gives the actual positions of things like the moons of Saturn and shows clusters and nebulas and stuff. It has extremely good rendering, where the sky darkens at dusk and the bright stars come out before things darken further at night. For anyone with even a passing interest in astronomy, I highly recommend it.
Here's how it looked from here:
Here's how it looked from here:
bladefixation2
Gold Member
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- Mar 28, 2004
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- 1,391
Just downloaded that software. It is amazing to say its free
- Joined
- Feb 8, 2006
- Messages
- 429
Bladefixation, I couldn't believe it when I found the software. Here's a couple other pictures:
This one shows the Andromeda galaxy above the house. Note the Milky Way on the right side.
This one shows the detail of the landscape and the colors of the sky at dusk. Note that the stars don't yet show, but Venus is about to come out. The constellations are drawn here. This software is the best I've seen, and it's free! You can go forward or backward in time, turn the ground on or off, have realistic ground fog, track planets or stars, and a lot more. It's open source, so keeps getting better as well.
To make my yard, I took pics with a digital camera every 45 degrees or so and combined them in Photoshop. I subtracted out the sky with a magic wand tool, so you can still see the stars through the trees. I used my telescope to find accurate coordinates of rooftops and moved the background in an .ini file until it properly matched. It is very cool to see at a glance that something like Saturn is just above the neighbor's house, and is about 1 roof distance up. I love this software! :thumbup:
This one shows the Andromeda galaxy above the house. Note the Milky Way on the right side.
This one shows the detail of the landscape and the colors of the sky at dusk. Note that the stars don't yet show, but Venus is about to come out. The constellations are drawn here. This software is the best I've seen, and it's free! You can go forward or backward in time, turn the ground on or off, have realistic ground fog, track planets or stars, and a lot more. It's open source, so keeps getting better as well.
To make my yard, I took pics with a digital camera every 45 degrees or so and combined them in Photoshop. I subtracted out the sky with a magic wand tool, so you can still see the stars through the trees. I used my telescope to find accurate coordinates of rooftops and moved the background in an .ini file until it properly matched. It is very cool to see at a glance that something like Saturn is just above the neighbor's house, and is about 1 roof distance up. I love this software! :thumbup:
It was a big moon last night, but unfortunately, in this location the moon was just rising as the eclipse was fully underway. As the moon rose higher into the trees the eclipse was waning and looked like a big cookie with a bite taken out of it.