Lunar Eclipse

This was not an easy night of shooting for me. I’m not often up too late, but I wanted to stay up to see the eclipse. As I learned with my trip to West Texas, don’t wait to do it later, it might not happen.

Around 10:00 PM, the skies were clear, and everything looked great, however, when I went to shoot, I got to my spot, atop a parking garage, and it was cloudy as far as I could see. Completely socked in. I checked my app, https://clearoutside.com/, and found that high cloud cover was low, and mid was around 84%. I waited a minute to see if I’d get a chance to view the moon. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that the clouds were moving quickly. That was also the bad news, when breaks in the clouds came, they were short lived. 

As defeated as I felt, I was in the mindset of I’m still up, I’m here, I’m equipped, lets wait it out and see what happens. 

I setup the tripod, my camera, the 100-400 with the 2x teleconverter, and my remote release for the shutter. 

I tracked the moon, and framed up the shot. With the full moon, getting pin sharp shots was easy. As I learned quickly, the moon is moving quickly, so even shutterspeeds of a second would result in blurry shots.

Shortly after I setup, I started seeing the shadow creep on to the moon. I had to adjust my tripod often to keep the moon in frame. I did turn on bracketing just to be extra safe. As the eclipse progressed, I dropped my shutter from 1/500-1/125, then started cranking up the ISO. By the time the total eclipse was happening, I was up to ISO 25600. Even then, the primary shot was still a bit dark, and I ended up using bracketed photos as my keepers. I do think next time, I would not do bracketing, and just enable burst shooting. It was a little windy out, but for whatever reason, I found often my first frame was blurry, but the subsequent shots were much sharper. The orange color was visible, but not quite as brilliant as the photo. 

I did call it quits around 3:00 AM, because I did have work in a few hours. It’s times like this I wish the Sony supported pixel binning.