Lunar Eclipse Photography

[thingy]

Wow rediguana! That is a truly awesome shot, I absolutely love it. The 'dark side', the craters, the sharpness, very nice indeed. As you background is totally black, you should be able to ge away with adding a strip of black down the left side in photoshop to resolve your cropping issue.

G

[Nicole]

Originally Posted by wulf

The moon is pretty bright so don't overdo the exposure time. When we saw the previous lunar eclipse in the UK I lent my tripod to a friend who had a 300mm lens and did hand hold shots with the kit lens on my D40. My results weren't that stunning and unfortunately my friend assumed that he needed quite long exposures and didn't check back on the LCD to review results so ended up with bright blobs rather than a detailed image.

The light drops as you reach totality but don't forget the lesson of checking the results as you go along (remembering that any built in metering is likely to struggle with making the right choice unless you use spot metering on the moon itself).

Wulf

I will remember to chimp the results as I go

And check on the spot metering

I'm very excited because the plans of the Wellington Flickr Group to head out as a group of people are really starting to come together.

[winterminute]

How do you know what time the eclipse is supposed to happen? I'm in Washington, USA so the map indicates that it will during Moon Set, but how do find out the exact time?

[Nicole]

The times are available from the NASA link, but to make life easier, here are the times
P1 - 07:52:11 UT
U1 - 08:50:57 UT
U2 - 09:52:00 UT
U3 - 11:22:45 UT
U4 - 12:23:50 UT
P4 - 13:22:29 UT

Change these times to your local times using Time and Date

[rediguana]

Did a little more playing tonight with some time lapse shots. All very easy when the moon maintains a constant magnitude, but not sure if this is viable during a total eclipse. I stacked the individual frames in CS3, and then calculated the stack maximum to produce the composite images. No cropping, but they have been downsampled for flickr. Links to the images are below. They are at 70mm, 200mm and 400mm respectively on a 1.6 crop DSLR. As they are just test images, please excuse the framing, cropping, and the odd wonky moon!



A few more tips I've picked up.

If it's going to be cold, put a lens hood on your lens if you have one. Not so much of an issue when you're pointing the lens up high in the sky though

A tripod that allows the head to be mounted at an angle is very useful once the moon gets up high in the sky.

It can be useful to align the horizontal motion of the moon with the panning axis of the tripod head. This makes it far easier to track and pan as the moon moves.

I found manual focus much easier - it saved the hunting especially when the moon was started in one corner of the frame. It can be a little tricky focusing it initially with a small viewfinder, and the moon being small in the first place with a normal telephoto lens.

You'll probably want either to lie underneath the tripod if your camera isn't that far off the ground, or a chair if it is higher up. You'll have to get your head underneath the screen to check, unless you want a laptop outside with you. An angle viewfinder may help a little for framing and focusing, but not with reviewing pictures.

I've preferred to capture raw rather than a jpeg - hopefully when the magnitude starts changing it will provide more latitude for adjusting the exposure if it needs to be placed next to others in a montage of the eclipse.

Cheers Gav

[RexK_Cozumel]

How much time between exposures was this done with? I want to try to get as much information as possible before the big day since it is going to be happening down here at 5:20 am I dont want to have to be out there with no sleep trying to figure out camera settings.

[Nicole]

Great examples Gav Thanks for sharing more info.

[porterd2nz]

Took this test shot a few days ago. This shot was taken at 4:42pm so there was a HUGE amount of light coming from the atmosphere.


EXIF:
SONY D-SLR A100 / SONY 75-300mm@300mm
1/6 (0.16667) f/36 ISO 100
2007:08:25 16:42:24
POST: Darkened in photoshop

[rediguana]

Yes, I forgot to add that the 70mm shots were taken roughly every 4 minutes, but I later dropped it down to 2m45s for the 200mm and 400mm shots.

[Nicole]

Originally Posted by porterd2nz

Took this test shot a few days ago. This shot was taken at 4:42pm so there was a HUGE amount of light coming from the atmosphere.

EXIF:
SONY D-SLR A100 / SONY 75-300mm@300mm
1/6 (0.16667) f/36 ISO 100
2007:08:25 16:42:24
POST: Darkened in photoshop

Seriously, 4:42pm? I'm amazed you didn't totally blow out the shot But I guess the f/36 helped. I'm just shocked because it's so light at 4:42 still lol