Dave’s Photo Blog

 

As you may recall, last fall I got skunked on a total lunar eclipse when it got cloudy and I went to sleep. This week’s eclipse was a totally different story. I got it. So turn on the black-light, play some Dark Side of the Moon and check this out.

 

 

When I’m preparing for this kind of shooting, I invariably am trying to think about what I am shooting for. When there’s a really good moon about, I usually want to find a landscape, cityscape or other feature that I can also place in the frame with the moon. I’m thinking about things like church towers, city-hall domes, bridges, etc. But as I studied the characteristics of the eclipse, I realized it was going to be a real stretch, both figuratively and literally.

Over eastern Massachusetts during the time of the eclipse, the moon is quite high in the sky – more than 45°. And wouldn’t you know, that’s also the angle the camera has to be at (with respect to the plane of the ground). But from there it gets even trickier, because this other object or feature cannot be really close to you. It is much better if it is relatively distant. The reason for this is that the moon will then appear much larger in relation to whatever this feature is and both can be in sharp focus. It goes without saying that it’s pretty difficult to find a subject, say, a mile away, that you can still see with the camera at a 45° angle.

So I just decided to take pictures of the moon and stars only. Keeping it real, man, old skool. Whatever. The moon itself during an event like this is pretty spectacular by itself. Here it is at something like ten minutes before totality.

Now, as we wait for totality, let me tell you a little about the setup here. I had two cameras running. These photos are all from the Canon 10D. I was using my 70-200mm lens, mostly at 200mm. With the smaller sensor size, that gives me the equivalent of 320mm. The other camera was my trusty old Canon FX loaded up with Fuju Velvia slide film. I had a 200mm lens with a 2x tele-extender for a total focal length of 400mm (minus two stops for the 2x extender, though). Both were mounted on tripods with remote shutter triggers.

I did all this from my backyard. While it would have been nice to go somewhere with darker skies, the moon is actually pretty bright, so I just walked into the middle of my yard and set everything up. I kept tripping the neighbors security light, but other than that it was great. Close to a bathroom too.

So now we are getting very close to totality. It’s a bit hard to see on the web version here, but there is just a sliver of direct light on one side of the moon now.

As I’ve obsessed about before, taking photos of the moon is hard enough under normal circumstances. Let me tell you a bit about what I was up against for these pictures as we reach totality. First of all, the moon moves pretty quickly. That means that there is a limit to how slow a shutter speed you can use. I tried to keep mine under a half second, but during totality things got pretty dark. I did end up both bumping up the ISO to 200 and opening the aperture. I was trying to keep the aperture closed up a bit, say, ƒ4.5, but I ended up taking many photos at different combinations of aperture and shutter speed. I still haven’t figured out which was best. It’s further complicated by the need for stillness. At ¼ of a second, the motion of the mirror flipping is enough to ruin the photo – cause it to be less sharp, I mean.

And the film camera, well, it struggled to keep things in an exposable range. I had few choices there. The lens was an ƒ4.5 to begin with and I threw a 2x tele-extender on it, essentially losing another two stops. I couldn’t open up this lens, or just change the ISO. However, I have decided to have it push processed, since most of the photos can stand it (I think). I’ll probably take it to Dorian and have them either push it or do a clip test, depending on what they think of the subject matter.

The last thing about the exposure it the massive difference in light output between the sunlit crescent of the moon and the rest of its’ surface. There are very few ways to accurately capture all of those ranges, so you have to either expose for the sunlight and have the moon go dark, or expose for the moon and have the sunlight wash out. I don’t think I took any pictures of the former, because I was there for the eclipse. Anyway, here’s what totality looked like.

The eclipse occurs because the earth slips between the sun and the moon and its’ shadow is projected across the moon’s surface. The shadow itself is much larger than the moon. In this eclipse, which was total, the moon passed through the earth’s shadow near one of the edges. So even during totality, there was a range of brightness from the washover of light. Very nice. I’ll bet astrophotographers with good telescopes did great on this eclipse.

And finally, there’s this. You could spend your whole time taking pictures with the lens zoomed out as far as it will go. But when you back off just a bit and pick up a few stars, it makes for a hell of a photograph. This one was taken several minutes after the end of totality. Click on the icon to see the larger image.