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Lunar Eclipse, 20th February 2008, originally uploaded by Senex Prime.

As promised, here's my night's work from last night's spectacular total lunar eclipse. This is a composite image of exposures taken at 5 minute intervals from 6:13pm to 7:03pm, by which time totality had been achieved. The moon started very low to the horizon, hence the yellower cast in the first few exposures.

I did a lot of reading on the web on how best to photograph the moon during an eclipse, and was quite surprised to see how little exposure is required to shoot a normal full moon... 1/125th second at ƒ/11 at ISO100! Any more than that and the brightness of the moon causes everything to blow out totally.

So I was armed with a handy table of exposure times by the time we headed out, and it proved to be pretty much spot on throughout the night. Which was good, because my attempts to bracket my exposures by using the Automatic Exposure Bracket function on my camera were a dismal failure... something about using the mirror lock (vital to not getting camera shake and a little ghosted reflection of the moon in my shots) caused it not to work, leaving me with three identical exposures instead of some nice bracketed ones. When I got to sorting my images in Lightroom, the first thing I had to do was simply delete two-thirds of my shots... Ah well, you live and learn!

Posted in: adobe lightroom, chaosboy, photography on February 21, 2008 at at 12:59:00 PM