Total lunar eclipse photos
Putting the post up now to maybe snag some extra search engine traffic 
Photos will appear here in the next hour for the 2008 lunar eclipse visible from North America. Got some good pictures from my home near Dallas, TX. It’s cloudy, but the clouds are moving fast so don’t pose a huge problem!
And here we are with some pictures!
To take these pictures I used my trusty old Canon 20D with the 70-200mm f2.8 IS lens. I also used a very crappy tripod. In this situation neither the IS nor the tripod helped me much. The first few pictures before the shadow is dominating the moon I took at an Aperture of f14 and a shutter of about 1/250 second. You can see these are much sharper than the latter pictures.
Since the 20D doesn’t have a spot meter I had to experiment a bit to find the exposure I wanted. Using center weighted or whole scene metering throws things FAR too overexposed for the moon. When shooting the moon you have to remember that the moon is very very bright compared to it’s surroundings. Even using exposure compensation, 2 stops underexposed according to the meter is no where near enough. I think at 1/250 @ f14 the meter thinks I was 6-10 stops underexposed. If I had a spot meter, I probably could have metered on the moon, and dialed it in with EC.
The latter pictures where the shadow dominates my shutter crept down to 1/30 - 1/2 second. These are not as sharp. I tried using IS on mode 2, full IS, sacrificing aperture to bring the shutter up higher and I just couldn’t get as sharp a shot. Time for me to get a real tripod.
5 Comments
» Leave one of your ownRSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Comment by Lasha — February 21, 2008 @ 2:06 am
Hey man, those are some pretty sweet pics! What settings did you use on your camera to capture them? I tried taking some pics but they all came out washed out - plus I had the worst angle ever! Sticking my head outside my apartment window and twisting towards the right. Clouds were sucky. Heh.
Comment by Alex — February 21, 2008 @ 7:44 am
Thanks, and good question! I’m going up to edit the post now with that info for other photographers out there.
Comment by Christy — February 21, 2008 @ 10:43 am
Sweet Ass!
Comment by Trevor — February 21, 2008 @ 11:29 am
Nice photos! I wish there had been more dust, smoke…in the air to yeild a more redish appearence. The next eclipse is in 2010 right? Maybe by then we will have had a atmospheric nuclear (Nukular) event allowing for even more viewing pleasure.
Comment by Dan — February 23, 2008 @ 11:33 pm
I tried taking a few photos of the eclipse with my new Nikon d40, but I didn’t get very good results. I’m still trying to figure out the exposure, apeture and all the technical parts after using a point and shoot for so many years since my college photography classes.