Lunar Eclipse Photos

Well, after returning home from helping Emily and Gav deal with Emily’s broken toe, we were in basically ideal viewing time for the Lunar eclipse.

For a change, one of these eclipses actually occurred at a time when Ottawa was not clouded over, and we actually got a great view of the whole thing. The view was made even better by the fact that our south-facing kitchen window looked right out onto the moon.

Of course, this presented an opportunity for photography, so I grabbed my camera and tripod, opened the window and snapped off about 75 photos. The best are here.

I started by just zooming in to the maximum optical zoom on the camera (4x) and got a half-decent picture:

You’re looking at a cropped version of that photo with actual pixels as captured by the camera. The original photo had a LOT more black space around the moon!

I was unsatisfied with the magnification, so I got out the binoculars that Carrie and Kevin gave me as a thank you for being in their wedding party. Armed with an elastic band (from broccoli I think) I affixed the binocular eyepiece to the lens of my camera.

As you can see, the moon is a lot bigger. Actually, it is WAY bigger than in the last photo as I had to reduce this one substantially to get it into blog size. The moon was about 100 pixels tall in the camera-alone mode, and about 1100 pixels tall in camera+binocular mode. Combined the lenses have an optical magnification of 36x, enough to clearly see the moon moving across the frame.

You can clearly see the white area (which is the eclipse receding) and the lower red area (which is the area still in eclipse). Although the moon is in the earth’s shadow, light rays striking the earth’s atmosphere are diffracted around the earth and some of these strike the moon resulting in its being partly visible. The light is red because the green and blue rays from the sun are filtered by the atmosphere (like at sunset).

A significant problem with this camera-binocular technique (besides trying to locate the moon in the sky at such a high magnification) is focus. As you can see from the above photo it kind of sucks from that point of view. This is because the camera and binoculars have independent and interacting foci. By zooming the camera into digital zoom mode I was able to get 120x magnification (sucky quality, but visible on the camera’s LCD), and this allowed me to see enough of the detail of the moon’s surface to focus the binoculars. Man… these binocular focus knobs need microadjusters for this kind of work.

Fiddling with the focus yielded this:

This is a result that I am very pleased with. Although sadly enough of the moon was now out of eclipse that the lovely red colour is no longer visible. At 36x magnification there was still enough light coming into the camera to snap that photo at 1/8th of a second at f4.5 (100 ISO equivalent), which for non-camera geeks is a rapid exposure for nighttime photography.

Time passes and I am still looking for the perfect shot. (I never stop, even if I think I have a good one. This is because I am a masochist who likes freezing my ass off in my fleece in the kitchen with the windows open when it is below zero and one in the morning and my cable release’s battery is failing.) I did get a couple more. I like this next one because of the blue outline around the moon… which I believe to be an artifact of chromatic aberration, due to the mismatched lenses in my homemade photo-telescope.

The best one, in my opinion is the last one. This photo is great. It has had Photoshop’s Sharpen filter run on it, and unlike the other photos I opted not to filter the minor amount of digital noise in the photo. But the data is all there and it wasn’t retouched by hand, I think this is a great photo of the moon. Very pleased with it… especially given my elastic-band photo-telescope.

(Aside: Noise Ninja has processed all but the last photo to remove digital noise from the images. Noise Ninja rocks my world. I highly recommend it.)

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