Lunar Eclipse as Seen From Minnesota – September 2015

It’s been almost a year since I’ve had time to post anything, but I’ll break internet silence with something quick and easy.  A combination of a lunar eclipse in near-perfect weather and a break between home projects motivated me to dust off the telescope and haul it out to the backyard to use as a tracking platform for my DSLR camera and one of my wife’s telephoto lenses.  I almost passed on the opportunity since there would always be better internet images available on the morning after (or even in real time), but what the heck…

It has been so many years since I have had the telescope set up in our backyard that the trees have grown to the point that the view of the celestial pole near Polaris – from the telescope’s position – is totally obscured.  The eclipse was to start early in the evening and there wasn’t a lot of time to futz with tracking a star and making adjustments, so I used the SkEye app on my phone (placed flat against the wedge base) to set the telescope mount roughly to the correct position during the day. … Read the rest