Eclipse - My fav shot

After a bit of playing about and cropping of shots from the eclipse, I have decided that this is my favourite:

Lunar Eclipse

On Friday and Saturday night, Simone and I went to a place on the NSW coast called Mollymook and stayed in a great apartment right on the beach. On Saturday morning, whilst watching the news I found out that there was going to be a lunar eclipse that night (Saturday 10/12/11) from between 12ish and 3ish in the morning.

I had never seen an eclipse before, and luckily I had my SLR with me on the trip, along with my standard zoom lens. Unfortunately I didn't have a tripod with me, so at midnight I found myself lying on the cold ground of our apartment balcony, with my camera sitting against an empty cake box that I molded to have my lens pointing in just the right direction.

It took quite a bit of trial and error to get the settings right, but I settled (with a few minor variants) on:

• Manual Mode
• ISO 100
• f 16
• 1/25  right up to 1 - 2 second exposure

As the moon got smaller, I had to increase the exposure time to compensate for the lack of light. I messed about with increasing my ISO but unfortunately jumped to the extremes (3400, 6400!) instead of playing around with more reasonable numbers (such as 200, 400, etc) - and the results were far too noisy. The higher ISO's did however show up the red glow far more effectively than the shots with the lower ISO's.

Overall, I am happy with how the shots turned out. I also messed about on the computer and merged a few into a single shot so that the transition is really noticeable. So here are the results: