Lunar Eclipse

Early Saturday morning, December 10, 2011 there was a full lunar eclipse. Here on the west coast we only got to see a portion of the lunar eclipse, it started just before 5AM and the moon was going to set at 6:30AM, but we lost sight of it before then due to a layer of clouds low on the horizon. This was tricky to photograph, as the exposures kept changing due to the moon going into the Earth’s shadow, so it got dimmer and dimmer, complicating matters was the sun was also rising, so the background got brighter and brighter. This first shot is a composite of 23 shots with a 50mm lens. Exposures ranged from 1/200 to 2 seconds at f5.6 at 100ISO. It was also a challenge to composite as the images ranged from a black sky to a much brighter blue sky as the sun got higher.  (Click on the images to see larger versions.)

This next shot is a composite of 3 shots taken with a 500mm lens, this shows the shadow moving across the face of the moon. The orange color is when the shadow is covering the moon, almost completely here, since the moon was full it was also very bright, so you need to choose what to expose for, the shadows or the brightly lit areas. The problem with bracketing and making a composite exposure is that there is huge dynamic range, so you would need a lot of exposures. Also the moon is moving constantly so you will get some shifting in the frame, but that can be dealt with, however the real problem is the length of exposure to show the details in the dim areas is so long that the moon is blurred unless you track the movement of the moon.

These were shot from Laguna Beach, it was an interesting experience and I would probably shoot things a little different next time, but overall I did ok. I would shoot at a higher ISO for the composite sequence and check exposures more often to equalize the relative exposure of the moon. I would also use a slighter longer focal length.  For the longer focal length shots, a higher ISO would give me a faster shutter speed and less chance for showing movement blurs and I would also make sure the image stabilization was off for this type of photography. Thanks for looking, feel free to comment.