• 2019 Total Lunar Eclipse

    This lunar eclipse was particularly exciting for me. I decided that since it was at a decent hour (9:30-10:30pm), I'd made a real effort to capture the event with my best camera. I hauled out my Nikon 4DS and my 2.8 fixed 400 mm lens and set it on my Manofrotto and started out trying to get an initial baseline image. Initally I got nothing but a blurry white ball. I'm no genius at this, so it took me quite awhile to finally realize I'd have to go to a manual mode so I could set my own aperture and shutter speed. I started with f10 and shutter speed 125, ISO about 125.  6:32 pm.

    8:32 pm

    8:46 pm...I can see I'm losing exposure as the moon is covered.

    9:04 pm...

    Uh, oh...we're about to go black

    And go black we did...I couldn't get an image to focus on AT ALL with these settings, so I started boosting up the ISO and even that wasn't enough, so I opened the aperture all the way to 2.8 and reduced shutter speed to 160. Finally at ISO 4000, I got this.

    Full disclosure here...this very closely resembles what I saw with my naked eye, but to get that red, I had to manage the White Balance a bit when I was developing the pics in LR. This image wanted to be BLUE and the temp was showing up in the 2000's, so I decided to just keep the temp at 4750 throughout as it had been for the first images...seemed like a reasonable thing to do and it did bring out the red.

    If you look carefully you can appreciate the moon rotating during this time period...the craters change positionl

    This is the last image as the shadow starts to pass by. It's fun to see some variation in color on this one. 

    By this time, my support system was getting sleepy, and I REALLY need a spotter as I took these images. By the last one, I was practically lying on my back on the icy driveway with that huge camera and lens hovering over my face. 

    A VERY COOL LEARNING EXPERIENCE!

  • Comments on this post (3 comments)

    • Mary Cay says...

      Great job.

      January 22, 2019

    • Joyce says...

      Stunning pictures, Carol. They are beautiful — thanks for sharing!!

      January 22, 2019

    • Peg says...

      Fabulous, carol!!

      January 21, 2019

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