Lunar eclipse 2019

[Peeb72]

Peeb, that just shows that its not the camera that takes the picture, it the photographer that takes the photo, because I have the same camera and my photos came out horrible. My longest lens right now is the 50mm though.

Very kind of you to say that- this is my second lunar eclipse attempt, so I simply tried to correct some of the issues I had in the first go-around! I started with the location. I have an app that measures light pollution, and I found a nice dark spot only 6 miles from my house, so that was a good start. (Light pollution wasn't going to significantly impact the moon, but it would mask the stars a bit...).

Here was the rig: Nikon D7200 with 200-500mm zoom, set at 200mm . I exposed this image at 1/2 second, wide open (f/5.6) at ISO 4000.

Even tho I shot all nite at 500mm, I intentionally backed off to 200mm for this shot for two reasons: (1) I wanted to capture some stars, and (2) the longer your lens is, the shorter your exposure must be. In other words, a 500mm shot will begin to motion blur from movement of the moon/stars much more quickly than a 200mm shot.

I have an awesome tripod that is SUPER stable (and heavy) and I use a ball head that allows you to reorient the camera sideways to make kind of a poor-man's gimbal. I used the self timer to avoid jostling the camera. I also turned off noise reduction and vibration reduction since the camera was already stabilized.

I experimented quite a bit with various ISO settings and shutter speeds and shot as slow as 2 seconds, but found that 1/2 second was a good compromise. I could get out some grain by going slower, but then movement blur became a concern.

If ANY of that helped, there ya go. If I made a few bad choices in there- anybody that can give me a pointer would be appreciated. I'm already looking forward to the next one!

EDIT: just gave your 50mm lens limitation some more thought. This is too short to be telephoto, but you COULD do a time lapse series where you depict the progress of the eclipse with an interesting foreground. I had another camera with me last night and tried to do this but it was a fail due to a focus miss (even tho I used painter's tape to stabilize the manual focus ring) AND lack of a really nice foreground AND frozen intervalometer.

EDIT 2: ALSO, forgot to mention that I was doing a 'kinda time lapse" by being sure to shoot at least every 10 minutes until totality. Due to the cold, I had hand-warmers taped to the lens to prevent frost from accumulating on the glass!

EDIT 3: BTW, the 'mission timer' started at 7:19pm when I left the house to set up, and ended when I walked back into the house at 1:13am- so it was a nice long time to be out in the elements!

Which app is it that you use to show the ambient light?

My light pollution app is called Astropheric (an ios app). It was downloaded primarily to predict cloud cover, but it has a little light bulb icon that,, if clicked, shows light pollution. Very cool.

 

[TreeofLifeStairs]

That seems like a great app.