By Cath Adams
The evening began at Perton Library listening to Andrew Lound give his talk Apollo – A Moon Odyssey 50th Anniversary Special. Andrew’s talk was fascinating, full of interesting information about the Apollo missions and original footage from 1969.
There were displays around the library featuring photos and artefacts from the Moon landings, which Doug had set up in conjunction with the library. It was all very impressive. After Andrew’s talk there was much discussion amongst a few of us as to where would be the best place to go to attempt to view that evening’s Partial Lunar Eclipse. Several people decided to stay in Perton and go to the lake area to view it, Richard suggested heading out Albrighton way as he thought there might be some good viewing points there.
As we came out of Perton Library things did not look promising, the sky was very cloudy in almost every direction! However, this did not deter Richard and I. Richard kindly offered to drive to save me trying to follow him to where he was going. We set off at around 21:50, I was sat in the passenger seat with my mini tabletop telescope and tripod on my lap, as we drove down the A41 I was craning my neck to see if I could catch sight of the Eclipsed Moon rising. Just as we passed the junction with the Shifnal road I caught sight of it, low on the horizon, we then decided to re route to the Shifnal road by driving down some random lane!
Several minutes were spent trying to find the best location, one minute the Moon was visible, the next it was not, there was so much cloud crossing the Moon never mind all the trees and bushes that were blocking our view on certain parts of the road. But our perseverance paid off! I got out the van took a quick snap with my mobile phone before setting up my little telescope.
After taking the initial mobile phone photo I quickly set about setting up my telescope as did Richard, both of us knew this was a race against time as the clouds were rolling across the sky at speed! Here are the photos that I managed to take from this location.
Both of the above photos taken by Cath Adams between 22:21 and 22:25 using a 76mm telescope and iPhone 7 camera.
Unfortunately Richard has some issues with his camera and didn’t get to take any photos at this location so we decided to move further up the road as the Moon has gone behind the trees.
We drove further along the road to Shifnal and off into a small lane, here we met two guys from Telford who were also looking for the Eclipse, they were setting up an 8” Celestron reflector in a field. Richard set up his telescope and camera, and then we waited for a break in the clouds. Once that break in the clouds came Richard got some great photos.