15 May 2003

Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Lunar Eclipse,  15 May 2003

I began observing around 10:00 PM EST.  There was a high cloud base with small pockets of openings.  The cloud deck consisted of what appeared to be a base layer with ‘feathers’ of cloud coming off the base.  The base reflected some of the ambient city light, giving it a middle gray value.  Pockets of dark area revealed themselves as either clear holes to the sky, or darker (perhaps more upper level) cloud.  This made observing the moon or predicting its appearance from behind the cloud deck, challenging.

My initial observations were made from my front yard.  With the moon at an elevation above the horizon of approximately 20 degrees, I had to keep moving my position so that I could see past trees in the neighbors yard.  This, compounded by the type of cloud deck, made predicting the next opportunity to view the moon extremely difficult.

As time progressed toward totality, I was able to observe the shadow progressing across the moon’s surface from the eastern limb.  I began shooting the event with a Nikon 995, handheld.  Soon, though, the frustration of judging the next appearance moved me to find a more agreeable observation point.  I grabbed my tripod, camera and a jacket, jumped into the car and drove to a location about ½ mile away on ‘Featherbed Hill’.

Featherbed Hill runs adjacent to the property of Delaware Valley College and overlooks its fields and husbandry farm.  I chose it, more importantly, for its unobstructed panoramic view of the NE to SW sky.  The 100 foot elevation over my former location gave me a clear view to the horizon (The clarity of the air was very good.  A strong, cool wind moved obscuring atmospherics out. As a frame of reference, the antenna farm in Conshohocken 15 miles away was clearly visible).

From this vantage point, I was better able to see upcoming ‘holes’ in the cloud deck and prepare for observing and photography.  I began photographing the event from here at 11:20 PM EST, well into totality, and completed shooting the eclipse around 12:00 AM (work was early the morning of the 16^th).  Using the Nikon CoolPix 995, I set the camera to ‘Normal’ compression (High Rez), manual mode, auto white balance, infinity focus @ max. optical zoom and noise reduction.  Exposure was (at ‘ISO’ of 400) 4 seconds @ f= 5.8 for most of the images.  This setup allowed for a reasonable exposure of the disk while keeping the value of the clouds, low.

The key to the observing was patience.  With ‘holes’ and dark upper clouds competing for time against the dark gray cloud base, it required a keen eye for the tell tail sign of stars poking through, just to get a bearing on an opening.  Hoping that the opening would then drift in such a direction as to line up my position with the hole and moon (and not have an unseen feathery cloud intercede and impair the view) more than not, ended without success.  The term, ‘sucker hole’ is duly noted, though nature clearly overlooked an appropriate sound effect to go along with the visual as a means of emphasis.

Nevertheless, I managed to shoot 15 or so images when the seeing was there.  As a note, the images show the moon with an obvious orange tint.  This was not the case when observing it directly.  Visually, the moon had not nearly the orange tint that is observed in the images.  Camera ‘contrast’ was set to normal and the exposure was not enough for the CCD to show a shift to red (something I experienced during the winter with exposures over 30 seconds).  Ambient temperature was in the 50’s. I’m not sure if this is a visual issue or camera.  Any takers?

All in all, it was an interesting event.

Here is a composite from some of the photos of the Lunar Eclipse. The time frame is from 10:40 through 11:57 PM EST on 15 May 2003. The first two were shot from the front yard of my home, before I moved to the top of the hill. The final group were from the top of Featherbed Hill in Doylestown, PA. A slight variation occurred in one of the final images due to some experimentation. The last four frames are roughly 10 minutes apart (kind of nature to provide holes at a reasonably constant interval. It is odd, but the moon did not appear this orange/red to my eye. I'm not convinced that it is the Nikon 995, as the exposures were only 4 sec., with noise reduction and limiting the LCD to only preview of the shot image. I usually encounter a red tint (even in the Dmax areas) at exposures greater than 30 seconds. I'm more curious if it was a contrast difference between the moon and the cloud base (I'm sure some light reflected off the cloud base was tinted warm by the sodium vapor and halogen type lights used in city lights). The contrast difference between the moon and the clouds may have been such a low value that it fooled the brain into thinking that the cloud and moon were a gray value (as there was no reference value for 'gray' other than the clouds. Going further, when we look at stars against the black sky, it is easier to distinguish between a red giant and very blue star, especially if they are close to each other. I would guess that if viewing these through a similar cloud base, their colors would be very different. Metamerism, I believe.

- Dennis