Lunar Eclipse with ASI2600MC?

I tried my 2600 with a previous lunar eclipse here.

1. Set your mount tracking rate to lunar, not sidereal, this will stop the drift in RA.

2. Use a fast laptop with SSD to minimise the frame-to-frame delays storing each image. ASaiAir is too slow.

3. Over the duration of the eclipse it will drift a little so consider how to make a guide to re-centre when needed eg apps like SharpCap or ASIStudio that provide a crosshair or target. Or place markers directly on the laptop screen post it-notes or tape, your call) 

4. Stability of your rig. The 2600 does not use a global shutter - the pixels are read as sequentially a raster. If you watch it in live view you’ll notice a “jello” effect occurs in response to slight movements in your rig - a passing vehicle, wind etc.

5. Exposure. Strongly suggest you get it out and practice on a full moon first because you might be disappointed, and have another choice as a backup plan eg a DSLR.

I too was primarily a deep sky guy until I bought an EdgeHD 8" and decided to dabble in planetary. You treat the moon like you would a planet. Even at it's thinnest crescent and even during the total eclipse it's going to be enormously bright. So with astro-cams, it's usually easier treat it like a planet and take video. Use Sharpcap or Firecapture to get the video, then autostakkert to produce a single stacked image, then process the image in any number of ways from Pixinsight to Photoshop. There's a dozen different youtube guides on Sharpcap and firecapture.

I just uploaded a bunch of pics to my gallery of the Moon I took with my 2600MC Pro throughout last December. I was planning on doing the same for the eclipse, using short videos then stacking them later... Adjusting settings to get proper exposure shouldn't be too difficult in Sharpcap as the eclipse is progressing, depending on how often I want to take pics for a time lapse... The 2600 isn't known for it's high frame rate, even cropping down a bit, using my EdgeHD 8" and a reducer, I think it'll be less than 20FPS, so doing a 1000 frame video is probably not a good idea.  Then take into account that the shadow will be moving, I'd say keep it to ~100 frames or so per exposure.... Maybe someone with more experience could give more specific advice.

@Mark Fox had some great advice for ASIAir users, I used nearly that exact method because I'm too lazy to learn NINA just yet. OP you'll have it a bit easier. I don't know what video options NINA has, but I'd recommend SharpCap Pro (I think it's worth the $30), but FireCapture is very good as well, and it's free. They both offer very direct control of the 2600 and easy on-the-fly adjustments.

Another +1 for short exposures, especially video.  Even though you set the RA tracking to lunar, there will still be appreciable DEC drift due to moon's tilted orbital motion, maybe an order of magnitude less than RA, but not negligible... probably a couple of arcsec per minute.  On the 2400MC with 3.8um pixels (approx), that's definitely a few pixels drift fairly quickly for those of us thinking video capture.

Going through this exercise has been helpful, and I recall my experience with my moon shots has been that I didn't care about tracking sidereal vs lunar, nor with any DEC drift.  Autostakkert! automatically took care of the drifting between frames.  I have shot as much as 9 minutes in a single video, and at the RA drift figure courtesy of @andrea tasselli , i would have seen a drift of 540 sec (9 min) exp x 0.5 arcsec / sec = 4.5 arcMIN over my exposure. On my fatpixel 2400MC, that would have been a drift of over 500 pixels.  No problem for Autostakkert! .

The key will be shortest possible subframe exposures. No doubt about that.  I may consider going with some combo of a darker histogram, 0.7x reducer, and stretching in processing.

I dunno....I'll figure it out and if I totally blow it, I always have March 3, 2026 in my back pocket.  And will likely dwell on my failure for a year.

Video capture is something else not tried so I'm wondering how much storage that would consume on the mini PC

Unfortunately, it will take quite a bit. Video in this case is just the FPS of single images... So without cropping each picture is about 50 megabytes, if you take 100 frames of video that's about 5 gigs each... I have a 4tb external hard drive... I was planning 100 frames every 5 minutes over the ~4 hours of the eclipse, so that's what... 200gb? Hmm... maybe I should go every 2 minutes...

Yes. Thanks guys. There is a 2TB on the mini PC, which amazingly has started to reach capacity not including image files. There is also another 4TB SSD drive connected by USB 3.0 which has the capacity but also seems to fail at temperatures approaching freezing or lower. I've yet to find any external drive that's rated for low temperature to sub in either. But trying to see how things will function will only be achieved by a test run as you stated. I don't think I need to video the entire eclipse, just run it at various stages and which I think NINA can do with Smart Exposure. Now the moon is coming up late just before new moon, and there will be time between that and full moon to give all these ideas a test. All tips appreciated.

CS,

John

You don't need all this stuff. Like at all. Ever. 1 shot and you're good to go. OK, let's say 1 shot a minute for the totality phase, that will allow for enough fall back and some limited stacking  (to preserve stars).