Moon-Antares Occultation 14-7-08

[ShevillWMathers]

Hi,

Late afternoon the sky conditions were perfect, so I got things ready in the obs and had planned to shoot stills & video simultaneously through two scopes.

The reality was, by 9pm there was 95% broken cloud cover with no breaks near the Moon, in fact a nice halo surrounded the Moon, so I took a pic-No1.

I thought, well, the gear is all up and running, lets see what it looks like through the scope. Nikon D300 attached at prime focus of my homebuilt fork mounted EQ Newtonian f/5. The Moon nicely fits the frame at this f/ratio.

So, I took some pics through the clouds as I could see Antares faintly, the seeing was perfect, just the transparency that was very poor. (understatement) No way was the cloud going to clear, just got thicker, so no shots of the emergence.

So here are the results, I had to crank up the ISO to 800 and exposures were around 125 to 250 to punch through the clouds. Normally up around a 1000th sec at 200 ISO with the 12" f/5.

Regards
Shevill

[kvwood]

Considering the conditions, these turned out very well Shevill! Cranking up the ISO seemed to do the trick!

Kent

[JAICOA]

A Fine capture with all the odds present, Turned up really nice you did great Shevill. Welldone and Clear Skies

[chrissy]

very nice pictures Shevill, thank you, they turned out great.

clear skies

chrissy