Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"To me, absurdity is the only reality." -- Frank Zappa (b. 1940-12-21, d. 1993-12-04)

"I saw the Earth's shadow. This means there will be another year of weather." -- Melanie Parr Cardell (via Facebook), 2010-12-21 after watching the Lunar eclipse

[To everyone, a happy solstice; to my Wiccan, Druid, and Asatru friends, good Yule!]

My sleep cycle is all turned around and inside-out, but it did mean I was awake for the solstice lunar eclipse. Photography didn't go as well as I would've liked (though no worse than expected), but I did get two shots that came out okay (yeah, there are three pictures in the linked album -- two are the same photo cropped differently).

From Solstice Eclipse

Years ago, I shot the moon on film using a slow 300mm lens and a 3x teleconverter. With the "crop factor" of the digital camera, this time I used a 400mm lens and 2x converter for the first shot (shadow creeping across a still-white moon). I tried using a department-store telescope, but that made the moon too large for the frame. As the moon went deeper into Earth's shadow, it was more dimly lit, so I had to take out the teleconverter to get enough light. Between the distance the moon moves in one second, and the lower resolution image (because the moon is only taking up a quarter as many pixels before scaling), the red-lit moon during the middle of the eclipse came out rather soft. I did try upping the ISO, but it actually looked worse with the kind of graininess I got than it did with the longer exposure here.

There are a few things folks often overlook when trying to photograph the moon. The first is how small it is -- we tend to remember it larger (and even perceive it in real time as being larger than it is when it's near the horizon), but with a normal lens[*] it's just a small dot in the sky. The second is how bright it usually is (when there's no eclipse going on): yes, it's nighttime where you're standing, and the camera sees a lot of black night sky around it in the frame, but it's (usually) full daylight in the place you're taking a picture of, so it's easy to get just an indistinct ball o' white by overexposing (though obviously I had the opposite problem when it was deep in Earth's shadow). Third, once you get enough magnification to really start seeing interesting detail, the moon is moving quickly enough across the sky to be a bit of a nuisance -- you have to keep re-aiming between shots, and as you see here, it moves enough to blur in a longish exposure.[**]

A faster lens would help. So would a sturdier tripod. Even a less-frosty night so I wouldn't have had to wear gloves. But given that I'm not really set up for astrophotography, I'm not terribly unhappy with what I got -- and I enjoyed seeing the eclipse in any case.

Apparently, mainstream media were playing up the rarity of an eclipse landing smack dab on the day of the solstice, but some viewers/listeners managed to get the garbled message that lunar eclipses themselves are centuries-rare. (If I understood the conversation that took place when I was half-asleep yesterday, one of Mom's friends was convinced that was the case.) Well, I've seen a few, but it was still cool to see it again -- the phenomenon hasn't gotten old for me yet..

I kept thinking that I should've had one camera set up to take multiple exposures, showing the moon moving across the sky and changing colours in one frame (either that one or the one with the long lens would've had be a film camera, since I've only got the one DSLR and I don't think my point-and-shoot will do double exposures), but in the end I decided to Google somebody else's version of that later -- I'm assuming somebody, somewhere, will have done that. Eventually I'll do one of those myself just to have one that's all mine, but not this time.

[*] "Normal lens" is a term-of-art, referring to a lens with a "normal" field of view ... which is generally considered to be in the ballpark of a focal length the same as the diagonal measurement of the camera's sensor (digital or chunk o' film). Depending on who you ask, for a 35mm film camera, that means either a 40mm or 50mm lens (50mm being more common, 40mm being closer to the definition). For other formats, the actual focal length will be different, but many digital cameras that have eensy weensy sensors and lenses with focal lengths like 6mm give their focal lengths in "35mm equivalent" measurements instead, with the idea that most users will be more familiar with how those translate to angle-of-view.

[**] Of course, a telescope mount with a clock-drive could help immensely with both the constant re-aiming and the motion blur. And I'm sure folks who are Really Serious about getting good shots of the moon tend to pick up such useful items. I want one, but wouldn't use it anywhere near often enough to justify trying to save up for it. Anyhow, there should be eclipse photos showing up around the web much sharper than mine.