Lunar Eclipse

[tigertoy]

Here I am staying up too late playing with pictures again.  I don't have the right equipment forastronomical pictures, but I have a camera and the clouds actually broke up (though it's foggy).  So here are a couple of pictures of the eclipse, one while it was still total and the other a few minutes later as the moon started to show through. I fiddled with the brightness, but not the color. Taken at 1/6 of a second, ISO 1600, 300mm f/6.3 lens, braced against my car because I don't own a tripod. Good pictures need a much longer exposure, for which I'd need a tripod. If I hadn't believed the cloudy weather forecast, I might have thought to borrow my mom's, but that didn't occur to me until too late.

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Actually, the equipment is quite reasonable for eclipse photography, except for the lack of a tripod, of course.

One of my students had good luck shooting the eclipse with his cell phone camera held up to the eyepiece of one of the school telescopes.

Me, I just sketched.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

The lack of tripod is what I was really referring to. A 300mm camera lens doesn't have the magification to be a very good telescope; the moon is about 320 pixels across in the raw images (out of a 3072x2048 field), but if I could have held the camera steady for 10-30 seconds I could have gotten fairly nice pictures.