I’ve had my digital SLR camera for a month, and it only now dawned on me that I could finally use a camera with my telescope - you know, for Wednesday’s big lunar eclipse. Only now, when it’s too close to order the parts I’d need - an adapter for my telescope and then a T-adapter for my camera. Well, okay, the time is too short and the parts are too dear - I’d need some lead time to save up for those. The next big eclipse is in 2010…
In the meantime, you can read here about why in general, binoculars are your best bet for this eclipse. Most telescopes have too narrow a field of vision. I’m lucky enough to have a wide field telescope - the Astroscan pictured above. It did dawn on me this morning that my telescope is more than half as old as I am. I bought it in high school (I think in 1989-90) when I saved up birthday money, baby sitting money and spare change to make half the total, and my parents thankfully chipped in the other half. I can still smell that money… I saved it in a Folger’s can!
So, if I had an adapter for the telescope and an adapter for my camera, I could hook my nice new camera up to my faithful old telescope and get some marvelous eclipse photos.
For now, I’ll have to make do with a few wide field shots, and pictures of my family using the telescope! Let’s just hope for clear skies.
This is the official graphic from NASA showing the times and phases of the eclipse, created by Larry Koehn at shadowandsubstance.com, where he also has a good animation and lots more information.
Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing this with JediBoy, using sites like Lunar Eclipses for Beginners and this lunar eclipse animation or this two perspective animation. If you’re interested in a more scripted way to teach your kids about the eclipse, try this discussion and demonstration activity. I’ll be spending time poring over sites like this one that have more tips for photographing the event.
I’ve also swapped out our book basket for kids’ books on astronomy. I’ll try to find the time this weekend to make a separate post about those books (I found 16 in our office, without digging hard), but for now they should be appearing in my Book Basket in the sidebar.
