With near 100% cloud coverage in my area last night I decided to try and capture the lunar eclipse anyway since I was still seeing occasional patches of clear sky moving overhead. Glad I made the effort even though most of the photos I took were hazy and had a halo around the moon due to a thin layer of clouds. I saw one really clear patch of sky with bright crisp stars moving in the right direction and was fortunate that it moved right over the moon giving me about 5 minutes to capture the eclipse at near totality. Moments later it began to snow and the show was over for the night as the storm rolled in.
ILCE-7CRFE 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 GM OSS lens400mmf/5.61/4s1600 ISO0.0 EV
Reflecting back, it's amazing how the red really becomes visible from the glow of the sun through the Earth's atmosphere. I can't imaging how fascinating the Earth must look from the moon during an eclipse!
I took some this morning, but the moon was so up high that I could not find any interesting background to frame with. Mine also didn't come out as red and bright, kind of boring.
This has the contrast to make the moon pops from the dark sky. Nice picture.
Thanks Wing, 99% of the rest of the photos I took were failures. It was tricky I thought to photograph. Had to be in a dark enough environment, use long enough and fast enough lens, plus then had to use fast shutter speeds plus finally keep ISO as low as possible to keep noise level down.
Odyssey1812 wrote:
I like this photo. I could never get my lunar eclipse photos looking this.
Thank you. I too tried to find a foreground to frame up and ran into the same issue as you with the moon being too high up. It was cool to witness and at least you made the effort and hopefully enjoyed the experience.
TCNg wrote:
I took some this morning, but the moon was so up high that I could not find any interesting background to frame with. Mine also didn't come out as red and bright, kind of boring.
This has the contrast to make the moon pops from the dark sky. Nice picture.
Thank you. I too tried to find a foreground to frame up and ran into the same issue as you with the moon being too high up. It was cool to witness and at least you made the effort and hopefully enjoyed the experience.
TCNg wrote:
I took some this morning, but the moon was so up high that I could not find any interesting background to frame with. Mine also didn't come out as red and bright, kind of boring.
This has the contrast to make the moon pops from the dark sky. Nice picture.
Great capture! I like the glow / flare that's on the top of the moon. When viewing it through binoculars I could see some of that, but it didn't really come through in the images that well.
One thing I would certainly suggest is to try is bracketing with 1/4 of a second as the low end. Use a 2 stop, 3 exposure bracket, which means set the camera for 1/15th of a second as the middle bracket. Then you have 1/4, 1/15, and 1/60 as your settings. You could just leave the camera at 1600 ISO and then push it the 4 stops in post since the camera is invariant. You would end up with a 1600 ISO, 6400 ISO and at 25,600 ISO at the high end. 25K ISO sounds like a ton, but with the limited amount of detail you are balancing motion blur versus ISO. (Side note: Lightroom's Denoise works really well on the moon and will clean up 25K ISO very well)
I didn't go quite as slow as you did because my experiences with the moon is that you really start blurring details, but the moon was so dark this time that I don't think those details would be captured regardless. I wish I did try some slower settings just to see what works.
