17 Apr 2014. I have finally finished processing my videos of the 14-15 Apr 2014 total lunar eclipse. They did not come out as well as I had hoped. I had trouble controlling the exposures of the LPI camera; I just could not get enough from it during the dark parts of the eclipse. This meant many video frames dropped during the dark parts, and made postprocessing of the images difficult. It has taken me a while to learn how to process these in Photoshop. I had intended to try to boost the saturation to make the red color I could see with my eyes show up better in these images, but after lots of messing around I elected to leave it alone (I may want to go back and redo the animated GIF I made from stills using all the things I learned messing with these; they're a lot better aligned than my earlier attempt). So here it is :
Date: 14-15 Apr 2014
Subject: Total Lunar Eclipse
Scope: Orion ST-80
Filter: Baader Fringe Killer
Mount: CG-5 (Synta motors, PicGoto Simplificado at Lunar rate)
Guiding: none
Camera: Meade LPI, 12.5 fps
Acquisition: SharpCap 2.1.915.0
Exposure: 12.5 fps avi, series over about 5 hours, 60 sec of video with 5 minute wait in between, 50 frames total
Stacking: Registax 6, best 30 frames
Processing: Registax 6 wavelets. CS6 combine into animated GIF. All frames (except the title) are 0.5 s.
I had a lot of trouble trying to control the exposures on the LPI; it does not have a lot of dynamic range. Also, there are obvious stacking artifacts in many of the subframes. Finally, the amount of color saturation leaves a lot to be desired. I probably should have recorded this with greater saturation to begin with, but starting with the full moon there wasn’t a lot of color to calibrate on! As with the still frames I recorded with my DSI, the eclipse was much more challenging to image than I had anticipated, because the change in light levels was tremendous.
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