Tag Archives: moon

Image of the week #20

May 21, 2012 by admin | Comments Off

This weeks images are of the partial annular solar eclipse. Taken with a Canon 1Dm4 and 100-400mm lens at 400mm and a 1.4x extender.  These shots will be part of a timelapse movie of the sequence. Also included is shot of the camera setup that was used to take the solar images. This setup will track the motion of the earth so that the sun always stayed in the frame as it was going down towards the horizon. The marks on the surface of the sun are sun spots. From the location, east of Temecula, the sun went down below the horizon as it was coming out of being eclipsed, the last shot is more red because the sun was right on the horizon and I should have increased the exposure and you can also see some of the brush on the horizon as the sun was setting. The eclipse occurred on May 20, 2012.

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Image of the week #11

March 18, 2012 by admin | 2 Comments

The summer Milky Way over the Sierra Nevada from the Alabama Hills, this image was taken last August but I finally got around to processing it. This is a single image taken with a Samyang 14mm f2.8 lens at f2.8 and ISO 3200 with a Canon 5Dm2. The moon had just risen up behind me and that is what illuminated the foreground and the mountain range, this 30 second exposure makes it look like daylight, almost. The Alabama Hills is a nice place to visit and is a familiar backdrop for a lot of Hollywood movies. This is located just outside Lone Pine, CA and in the mountain range to the right of the center of the image is Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Continental United States. The image turned out a lot better than I thought it would so I am pretty happy with it. Hope you enjoy it also.

 

 

Lunar Eclipse

December 11, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

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.