lunar eclipse

I stood out in the cold last night, freezing my fingers off! Okay, I did pop in and out of the house to warm up a bit.

I learned that it is quite difficult to take a decent photo of a lunar eclipse. But, I did figure out that a aperture of 4.0 and an exposure of 6 seconds seemed to work okay. ISO was set at 100 in an attempt to reduce noise. Obviously I had the camera set up on a tripod, and was using a zoom lens (70-200mm, set at 200). I was able to reduce most of the camera shake by using the camera’s self-timer. I read that trick somewhere, and I apologize that I can not remember where it was so that I can give due credit. Unfortunately, the photos are still a little fuzzy. I’m not sure if this is due to my horrid eyesight (I have an awful time telling if something is in focus until I actually see the photo. Viewing the photo on the LCD screen afterwards only helps so much for me) or if it’s due to gases and debris in the atmosphere. Yes, I totally just made that theory up, to make myself feel better about my horrible eyesight. I actually don’t know enough about astronomy to know how or if gases and debris would be noticeable via a zoom lens, but I sure am going to go look it up in a moment!

Partial eclipse:

Total eclipse (approximately mid-eclipse):

Total eclipse with one star streak:

I know that they aren’t the best photographs, technically speaking, but they are pretty cool as far as documenting an event that I witnessed, and it was a good experience for playing around with my camera settings. I would have loved to document the eclipse as it progressed through totality, but I set the camera up too late to take more photos of the initial partial eclipse, and then during the total eclipse a huge cloud formation took over the sky. And by huge, I mean the entire sky that I could see was engulfed, and would be for the rest of the night. Oh well, at least I was able to see as much as I did.