Lunar Eclipse

I’m sure lots of people saw the lunar eclipse last night. Or maybe I just like to think I wasn’t the only one out on my roof with my camera at two in the morning. The eclipse peaked here in Southern California around 3am, but I was up anyway because I’d gone out with some friends to see the movie Stardust and didn’t get home till 1am. I enjoyed the film, by the way

Anyway, while I’ve seen lunar eclipses before, I’ve never tried photographing one. In fact, I’ve never really tried photographing the moon before, period. I guess I always figured it’s so beautiful and symbolic and mysterious that hundreds of thousands of photographers have already captured it in far more creative ways than I could dream of, so I never really tried.

But I’m glad I did. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, really.

Here’s a composite of the first half:

(I was too tired to stay up for the second half, which probably would have ended close to dawn.)

I was using a tripod (of course), and a simple 70-300mm zoom set all the way at 300mm. It was kind of like a low-powered telescope, and worked pretty well, especially with my D200′s crop ratio!

The copper color during the total eclipse phase comes from sunlight scattering through the Earth’s atmosphere before being reflected off the moon. The same effect happens during sunsets and sunrises, which is why they appear so red and orange.

Find out more about lunar eclipses, and view more (and better) sights of the universe at Google Earth.

You can also find out when the next lunar eclipse visible from your area will be at NASA’s lunar eclipse page!

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