Lunar Eclipse

The weather turned out to be perfect for the January 20th/21st lunar eclipse, though the 16 degree (F) temperature made it interesting. I hadn't had a good chance to see a full lunar eclipse before, and it was stunning!

I started taking pictures at 10:30pm EST and took another picture every 5 minutes to try and make an animation of the eclipse. Before the eclipse was total I used a shutter of 1/160s and an ISO of 400. During totality I used 0.62s shutter and 6400 ISO.

With my telescope and 2x barlow lens I can't see the entire moon, so I took enough pictures that I was able to photo-stitch the entire moon. So each image of the moon is actually about 5 or 6 actual photographs.

Before the eclipse started the moon was absolutely stunning, it was amazingly bright and the atmosphere was incredibly clear.

The individual photos of the eclipse turned out well, though it was difficult to align all the images to make an animation. Once the illuminated portion of the moon got small enough the alignment software had a hard time lining it up with previous images. About twenty minutes into the eclipse a nice chunk of the moon had disappeared in the shadow of the Earth.