AUGUST 17, 2008 PARTIAL LUNAR ECLIPSE

Hello:

Amid a very bad rainy evening last August 16th. I went to PAGASA Observatory in UP-Diliman to observe the August 17th partial lunar eclipse. I was joined by fellow ALPers Edgar Ang, Vincent Lao, Peter Benedict Tubalinal and Jett Aguilar. We arrived at the site at around 1:45am and I quickly setup my TV-101 refractor on Vixen GP-D mount. I also brought along an Orion ST-80 refractor on sturdy tripod for use by rest of the gang :) A little later, Jett arrive and also started to setup his telescope.

The sky western horizon where the Moon is situated was clear at the start of the event from 2:15am til around 3:30am wherein thick clouds started to ruin the event :( Although the eclipse can still be easily seen, it was a nightmare for us imagers as exposures was thrown off by more than several stops!!! Nevertheless, I still took patience and waited for some open window for me to shoot the eclipse. The weather would come in thick at times and then suddenly thinned out for us to be able to image the eclipse at maximum eclipse through thin haze.
At around 5:15am, the sky was becoming bright already and harder for us to shoot the eclipse Moon any further and we called it a day! We were all very happy that the sky did give us some breaks for us to document the event. We took a group shot before packing up. Below are some images that I took of the event and one can see how bad the sky as during the imaging session as seen through my composite image.