2000-07-16 9:50pm-12:00am AEST – Total Lunar Eclipse
Conditions: clear sky, no wind
Equipment:
- Pentax 16×50 PCF III binoculars
- Canon EOS500 SLR camera with Tamron 200mm zoom lens
- Vanguard video camera tripod
There had been some clouds in the sky over the last few nights and a forecast of showers clearing. On the night however, the sky was clear in every direction.
These were frequently changed over on a Vanguard video camera tripod.
I had a friend over and we sat bundled up waiting for things to start with the temperature down around 5°C. We knew the eclipse had begun when we saw the moon gradually darken, as it entered the penumbra, that seemed to start in the lower right quadrant. This was more clearly visible through the binoculars, but you could not see any transition line.
Once the transition to totality started, the moon started to take on a relatively light orange colour. Even at totality the colour remained fairly light. I have read that during the last lunar eclipse there had been a lot of volcanic activity on Earth and as result the moon had been a much darker red colour due to the dust in the upper atmosphere.
I took around twenty photos on Fuji 400 ASA film with my 200mm lense. They came out okay but were a little small in the FOV of the camera. I did learn something interesting as result of getting the film developed at a local K-Mart, however. Their Kodak development system automatically screens the negatives to determine which ones to print. The exposures became darker as the moon progressively darkened, and once some unknown limitation of the machine had been reached, it refused to print them even though I could see a crescent on the negative.
The better option in future is to take the film to a more up market developer and get them to use better equipment and manually produce the prints. I can still get the remaining negatives printed though, as the film was processed properly.
