Lunar Eclipse

There was a lunar eclipse tonight, and I had a chance to further test my new camera. It wasn’t the best night for moon shots (there was some cloud cover, and probably some moisture in the atmosphere making the photos less crisp), but the moon stayed clear enough to watch the whole progression. At totality, which was just before the first photo below, the eclipsed moon displayed its characteristic dusky red colour. (I am not sure if this shot is a bit out of focus or if there is a faint haze between here and there. I hadn’t realised until recently that the “infinity” setting for a camera lens is not necessarily right at the end of the focus range, and so it can be easy to get distant objects out of focus.)

As the eclipse continued the surface gradually reappeared, returning to its full moon white. (In the photo below either the haze had cleared a bit or I’d focused better!)

I had the camera on a tripod, and took a whole series of photos, but I wish I’d gone to the trouble of (a) taking a set of “bracketed” exposures, since it is hard to get the exposure settings right (the sky is very dark, the white regions of the moon are very bright, and the red is quite a few f-stops in between) and (b) taking the photos at set time intervals instead of “every so often”. Nevertheless, although there are lots of problems with the following set of shots, it was fun to produce the sequence.