Total Lunar Eclipse of January 2019

The storm moved through, the skies cleared and so I set up in the freezing cold and wind to capture the best placed lunar eclipse in a long time.  I was planning to image this event, but the weather didn't look like it was going to cooperate earlier in the week.  With my remote focuser still in repair I would have to manually focus to get the images.

But the skies did clear, and this was a fantastic evening.  I stayed up to capture the whole event, setting up at 4:30PM and finally tearing down at 2:40AM the next morning.

I used my GT102 f/5.5 APO refractor with my Canon 50D as the imaging camera.  Backyard EOS was the imaging software.  Since I wanted to produce a time-lapse image, I had to sit by and capture a new frame every 6.5 minutes.  Here is the mid-eclipse shot at maximum totality.

Mid Eclipse - 12:12AM Jan 21, 2019
GT102 APO at f/5.5 - Canon 50D - ISO 400  4 Seconds

And the time-lapse, of 33 images.  Sorry for the 'bouncing' around, but I didn't take the time to register each image exactly.

Finally, the moon was rather dark during this eclipse, and so lots of stars could be seen around the area of the moon.  Here is a wide field shot at 8 seconds so that the stars can be seen.

All in all it was a great evening - but I'm still feeling the tingling in my fingertips from the bitter cold and wind while I was packing everything up.  I'm still planning on building an observatory to house both scopes.