Taking pictures of the moon’s eclipse
Sunday, March 4th, 2007Tonight we had a total lunar eclipse here in Europe. I tried to take some pictures of it with my new Nikon D80 I bought a month ago. Though taking pictures of the sky at night showed much more difficult than I thought!
First of all, you don’t have a chance getting nice results without mounting your camera on a tripod. Even if you have a tripod, there’s still the inevitable effect of the earth’s rotation which will cause visible blur if the exposure time is too long (say >1s). There is no real, inexpensible way to compensate for that. Just use shorter exposure times.
I started playing with different exposure times and - varying on the current phase of the eclipse - found exposures between 1/4” and 1/40” the most usefull. Most of the pictures will result somehow flawed. Either they are overexposed on the bright side of the moon or they get blurry. You would also need a much more powerfull lens than the one I had available. I took the pictures with a 135mm lens which is actually not even close to what you would need to take a picture with great detail. But, see for yourself!
