for the Partial Lunar Eclipse 2008 August 16

Byron Soulsby - Isabella Plains Lunar Observatory Australia

Hand Guided Movie Trials from Unitron/LPI Camera

The Meade ETX90EC with the LPI camera produces an image equal to that achieved with a 6 mm eyepiece which is around 200 times magnification. This is too large to obtain a full diameter image of the Moon for measurement using Digimizer.

A Unitron 40 mm refractor was fitted with the LPI camera and is used with the MacBook and camera/driver to produce an image from a movie of the field as required. The Meade drives are ideal for tracking but this telescope is not transportable from my site for the next lunar eclipse in 2008 August 16. Hence, the Unitron/LPI system was mounted with the Panasonic video recorder to form a highly transportable hand guided system. A first trial movie was made. This is the movie

A sequence of images has been prepared including a trial image measured with Digimizer, these can be viewed in a 1 MB pdf file here.

The Meade is used with the LPI for Occultations using the MacBook and the same camera/driver to produce a similar reference movie from which to save images for measurement and timing of events.

Another video has been produced with a counterweight fitted to the Panasonic/LPI Camera head to improve manual tracking. The movie (18.7 MB) can be seen here.

counter1


This is the reference movie file.

As a backup system to the LPI I will use my Panasonic NV-GS15 movie camera to record this eclipse hopefully to Moonset.
A test video has been made at full Moon on 17/7/2008 and an image captured by firewire is shown here:

moon.jpg

Here is the image from the LPI taken at the same time:

lpi

Produced by the Isabella Plains Lunar Observatory Australia on 2008 July 19.