Monday, June 28, 2010

Pre-Eclipse Success

Wow, the past few days have been exciting and annoying. But most importantly I got to witness and capture this weekends partial lunar eclipse in near complete detail. And as an added bonus Saturday the 26th was also my birthday Weeeee!!!

Ok so let's back up to Friday evening, June 25th 2010. I went to my favorite moon rise shooting spot in east San Jose to catch the full moon rising over Mt Hamilton, actually the far south end of it since it rose at 122° azimuth, the same azimuth as on Thursday the 24th, but my attempts to precisely locate the rising position were thwarted by cloud cover as I mention in my previous blog entry. So I had to use the force and my guesstimate based upon catching the moon rise on Wednesday. I had a friend with me who let me borrow his Canon 5D mkII for the weekend to capture the eclipse on 2 cameras. I mounted his 5D to my Bigma 50-500mm lens at full extension to catch a wider view of the moon coming over the horizon. I used my 1000mm lens combo on my Canon T2i to get an extreme closeup view of the moon cresting the horizon.

Fortunately we got there a bit early because this was my first time using the 5D in over a year and I had totally forgotten how to record video with it and he had never shot video with it. Thankfully my memories of renting it back in the spring of 2009 came back to me after a few minutes of fiddling with controls. I must say that Canon really has done a great job with making video recording more user friendly on my T2i versus the legendary 5DmkII. I'm sure his body is still using the original firmware so I'll hold off making any further comments about how difficult it was to use that body.

The important thing is that I was all setup to get the shots I've wanted to get for the longest time. Dual video recordings of the moon coming over the horizon, one at 1600mm and another at 500mm. And it was stunning!!! Unfortunately I was so excited to be shooting video on two cameras and distracted by recalling how to shoot video with the 5D that I forgot to take any stills. Thankfully I was shooting HD so here are some still extracted from the video.

Here comes Luna!



Notice the extreme atmospheric distortion around the edges of the moon




And the moon is so RED due to the atmospheric distortion as well.



The distortion is still there but reduced as the moon inherits the dusky sky from the sun.


If you look at the bottom of the image there is a little black speck on the moon, that is a plane crossing that I didn't see until I got home and started editing the video footage :)


And here the moon is ready for a night of eclipse action.


So far everything was as I had hoped for and more. I was able to capture the extreme heat distorting effects of the atmosphere causing ripples and eddies along the edges of the moon with a reddish tint as it rose through the thin haze over the mountains in other wise clear skies. It was soon dark after the moon came over the horizon and we had to leave since my shooting location was closing.

I came home and consulted my array of WeatherUnderground tabs that gave me updates on weather conditions on cities in the Bay Area. While most every coastal city from San Francisco, to Half Moon Bay to Pescadero was experiencing cloudy or over cast conditions Santa Cruz seemed to be clear. I was excited to see this because I wanted to shoot the moon and the receding eclipse as it set into the Pacific ocean.

However around 10-11pm I went outside to get some stills of the moon from my backyard and got setup just in time to snap off a dozen shutter clicks before a nasty thick cloud cover came rolling in from the west.

I assumed this was the same fog and overcast clouds blowing in from the ocean that had blanketed all the coastal cities I wanted to shoot from. I went back inside to the disappointing weather update that indeed Santa Cruz was becoming cloud covered, not only ruining my plans of catching the moon descending into the ocean but also meaning I might miss the eclipse all together if everywhere within a 2 hour drive was going to be overtaken by thick overcast skies :(

I spent the next 2 hours searching for webcams in various cities like Santa Cruz and San Jose and checking satellite predictions for the 1-6am time frame of Saturday morning, all with very bad news that everywhere from north of San Francisco to south of Monterey and even as far east as Gilroy would be covered in overcast skies during the early morning hours. I honestly wanted to cry but remembered a friends suggestion that I go up Mt. Hamilton which overlooks San Jose and the surrounding Santa Clara county areas.

I started up the Google Earth app, multiple tabs of Google maps and weatherunderground and began to search for potential spots that would get me above the cloud cover that was rolling over the entire Bay Area. I knew it would be bad to go all the way up to Lick Obeservatory since drivers headlights interfere with observation there but also figured that going all the way up would be overkill. Thankfully wunderground.com gives great detailed stats on cloud conditions for each particular area it reports on, down to the individual communities and neighborhoods where weather stations are. I could see that in my area of far south San Jose that the cloud cover was at 1200ft above ground level and combined with the info that area of San Jose was 200ft above sea level I was able to calculate that I needed to be above 1400ft or about 430meters above sea level. Using Google Earth to find CA-130E/Mt Hamilton road I was able to locate several places around 600+meters above sea level that would point me in the right direction and hopefully be above the cloud cover to see at least some of the eclipse if not the peak moment.

I emailed myself directions to my phone and also printed directions and double checked that all my gear was in order and ready to go. I made and ate a tasty sandwich so I would have energy for what was to be a long night/morning. Then headed off to the eastern hills of San Jose hoping for a night of successful partial lunar eclipse shooting...

Ok time for a blogging break, full details about the eclipse in my next post :)

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