March 2025 Lunar Eclipse

I've been thinking about trying for more astrophotography. In early March I drove out to the somewhat unfortunately named Blind Pony Lake, armed with my telescope, the mount that I had somehow ended up with, and a SVBONY SV305C Planetary Camera, which while not the cheapest camera, was still very much on the lower end of the range. Turns out I'm really bad at pointing a telescope at Polaris, which is kind of critical when doing astrophotography. I had also decided to give up on using the Android app that can talk to the telescope controller, and on controlling it with a Raspberry Pi running KStars and the whole INDI stack, and just lugged my laptop with me.

I had some success with getting an ok polar alignment from my driveway with SharpCap hooked to an older camera body of mine, since the camera and telescope didn't have a wide enough field of view to make the polar alignment stuff in Sharpcap happy. But using Sony cameras with ASCOM, which SharpCap uses to talk to some cameras, is kind of flakey, which is why I decided to get a dedicated planetary camera. Blind Pony Lake was going to be the full on dry run before the lunar eclipse. I had picked it out as a spot before when looking for dark skies in the area, and while not that dark, it was only an hour away. That run went mostly fine, though I did order a finder scope that could fit the planetary camera in hopes of not having to use my Sony camera.

Night of the eclipse, I loaded up with caffeine and headed out with a friend, a camping table and chairs borrowed from another friend. Set everything up, got decently polar aligned (Though I still had to break out my camera body to do it), and pointed at various things in the sky until the eclipse started. Most of those didn't turn out well, besides one stack of Jupiter.

Unfortunately there were high clouds coming in and out for most of it so I didn't get that many good moon pictures. I was wanting to get a timelapse, but the clouds got so heavy at times SharpCap lost tracking completely so it became useless. But I did get some good photos between breaks in the clouds.

I need to go back up to northern Missouri or somewhere else dark and try for things not the Moon or Jupiter.