Partial Lunar Eclipse August/2026

This uploaded "image" is a .gif snapshot of my time-lapse capture of the August 27-28/2026 Partial (96%) Lunar Eclipse. 

Captured with my Seestar S30 Pro in Southern Manitoba, Bortle 4/5, rural, alt-azimuth mount method.

Captured core 5 hours of -just under 6 hour total- event: from 9:02 PM to 2:02 AM local time.



>captured at 1x magnification (=no magnification),

>5 second intervals of RAW format (chose 5 second intervals instead of 1 or 2 seconds because I was concerned with storage space limitations vs. the resultant raw.avi).

>dew heater used (Seestar was fully charged and had a power-pack attached)

Hardware/Software Observations:  Seestar S30 Pro tracked the moon (kept it centered, very well...though it was not at all tested by any clouds).  The Seestar tracked very well but not perfect, so used Planet Image PreProcessor (PiPP) to center the moon when required.  PiPP was also used to (properly set) Bayer, to rotate video 180 vertically and also to flip video left to right so as to have final video show what I observed with my eyes, and also to crop closer to the moon as well as to counter Alt-Az based field rotation, which it did fairly well...though not perfect as the software could not use "surface features" as guide throughout due to earth's shadow obscuring the moon's surface features, and while using the bright "top" worked, it was not perfect.  Additional rotation seen late in the video as the shadow of the earth is receeding was somewhat corrected in Cyberlink Power Director 16 using key frames to mark start/end positions of a counter rotation attempt.

Note: used Power Director to speed up the original post PiPP video five times faster so that the eventual file size of the .gif would not be too huge!
Overall time compression: 5 hours > 2 minute post processed video > ~20 second gif.

Summary: while the original 5 second timelapse capture turned out a great video of just under 2 mintes, I made sure put in the extra time and effort to reduce a pretty decent capture of the Partial Lunar Eclipse to this pretty poor .gif.  ;)

-whatever...at least I learned more about PiPP!

-stargazer.man