Astroblog: Animations of the July 28 Lunar eclipse (2018)

Monday, August 06, 2018

Animations of the July 28 Lunar eclipse (2018)


Entire sequence of the eclipse stacked and aligned in GIMP, starting every 5 minutes until totality and then every 10 minutes until the Moon finally disappeared behind the roof tops (4:06 am.-6:23 am) Sadly the later stages are made rubbish by whatever compression GIMP uses, but you can see the beginning of the glow as maximum eclipse passes (totality ended at 6:44 am; click to embiggen).	Inital sequence of the eclipse up until the start of totality stacked and aligned in ImageJ, starting every 5 minutes until totality. I didn't do the full sequence as aligning moon images in ImageJ is a right pain, and they tend to get out of sequence. but the quality of the fully eclipsed images is much higher.

Here, as promised, are my animations of the total lunar eclipse of July 28. Because the motor drive on the telescope decided to stop working, I had to manually drive the scope, and the images were not aligned, so I had to align the images by hand. This is a pain in both GIMP and ImageJ (even though there are tools in both to do it they each have their own limitations.

But in the end it work out okay, mostly. not too happy with the way GIMP made the eclipsed images low res, but it does give you a feel for what it was like.

Labels: animation, astrophotography, eclipse, gimp, imageJ, Moon