This is my first post in newly created Community called 'Afterdark' - A community for astrophotographers, night landscape photography and anything shot in the hours of darkness.
Regular readers will remember the posts I made about photographing the Solar Eclipse event that occured in the UK in March 2015. I was immensely proud of the image, and thoroughly enjoyed taking the time to photograph this amazing event. A few months later I was made aware that there was a Lunar Eclipse due to take place in September 2015, and buoyed by my previous success, I endeavoured to capture this event too.
So what is a Lunar Eclipse?
Image By Tomruen - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Source from Wikipedia
You can see in this image from wikipedia: a Solar Eclipse occurs when the moon lines up directly between the sun and the earth, whereas a Lunar Eclipse occurs when the earth lines up between the sun and the moon. Because the causes of both events are different, the durations of each event are different too. The Solar Eclipse takes approximately 2 hours from start to finish, but the Lunar Eclipse can take over 5 hours to complete. Each Lunar Eclipse is slightly different: this one started at 1:10AM and finished at 6:20AM.
Eggishorn / CC BY-SA, Source from Wikipedia
The image above also shows the lunar eclipse turning red. This is why the Lunar Eclipse is often refereed to as a Blood Moon. The image looks quite complicated, but essentially it is due to the light from the sun passing through the earths atmosphere, which slows the light down and makes it 'appear' red. A similar process also causes the orange/red light that we see when the sun sets at the end of a normal day.
The set-up was similar to what I used for the Solar Eclipse. The camera was the same (Canon Powershot SX50HS), I had a tripod set up, a cable release, and a spare battery ready. As I was shooting at night I obviously did not need the 400ND filter from the previous event.
As I was shooting through most of the night, I tried going to bed early (7pm) to try and get some sleep. It failed as I was so eager to see this amazing event, but I got some rest at least. The alarm went off at midnight and I had an hour to get set-up. I set the camera up using a tripod, and connected the cable release.
For the non-photographers out there: The cable release is a essentially a button on a piece of cable, which allows me to take a picture without touching the camera. This helps to elinminate camera shake and therefore results in sharper images
Taking pictures of the moon needs clear skies, and fortunately there were no pesky clouds to spoil my view. As I was going to be there for the whole 6 hour session, I set up a chair to sit next to the camera, and I made sure I wrapped up warm (hat/gloves/scarf - it was the middle of Autumn remember!)
I had double checked the time, and when the clock said 01:11AM I started to take pictures. It was going to be slower than the solar eclipse, and to begin with I couldn't see a great deal of change. I trusted the calculations, and started taking an image every 3-4 minutes. After 30 mins or so, I could just see the first signs of a black dent appearing in the side of the moon. Time passed and this black shape grew larger and larger until over half of the moon had 'disappeared'.
It was around this point that I had my first problems. The moon, especially a full moon, is the brightest point in the night sky. This is quite obvious when you think about it, as the moon is only seen do to the reflection from the light of the sun. There is a reason astrophotographers only take pictures of the night sky when there is a 'new moon' because the moon is such a bright light source that it ruins the entire image.
With the moon getting increasingly dark, I was struggling to change my settings to keep the exposure even. This was worse when we made it to the mid-point of the eclipse when the moon turned a beautiful Blood Red. At this point the moon was so dark that I briefly lost it on the camera, and had to frantically re-focus and centre on the moon again. While panicking to capture as good a picture as possible, I wasn't really able to sit back and appreciate the beauty of this fantastic event. I do regret that... but I at least managed to get the shot I needed.
After the Red phase, the moon slowly appeared again, getting brighter and brighter as it changed. Eventually by 6AM, it was now a completely full moon again. Mission accomplished, I went straight to bed. I managed a meagre 3 hours sleep before getting up to do a 10 hour shift at work. That was a looooong day I can tell you!
A couple of days later, I uploaded 400 odd images to Lightroom. As with the previous Solar Eclipse shoot, I took a while to sort through the images, picking out the ones I wanted to create a sequence, and then editing them so that they all 'matched'. As mentioned earlier, I had problems with the settings during the middle phases, so I had to spend significant time on correcting various images.
I then exported the chosen images to photoshop to create the final image and viola!
The image shows the full sequence in a clockwise layout, and is probably a more interesting image when compared to the Solar Eclipse image. I think that is donwn to the fact that the Moon is such an enigmatic feature in the night sky, and the 'Blood Red' phase is so distinctive.
Once again, thanks for reading... I don't do enough astrophotography, and I would love to do more of it in the future
Article written using the Wikipedia article as a reference point
Diagrams are not mine and have been taken from Wikipedia
Images showing the sequence of the Lunar Eclipse are taken by @dannewton
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That's impressive, nice work!
I've always quite fancied doing some astrophotography but never gotten around to it. I might have to do a bit of research and give it a try. My photoshop skills are zero though (I usually only work with Lightroom) so I might struggle to put something like your final result together. Ah well, something new to learn is always good!
Thank you!
Its a fascinating subject... and I'd love to go take pictures of the Milky Way etc. The hardest part is finding a place with low light pollution which means I need to travel to the middle of nowhere, and I don't drive so options are limited.
Photoshop use was minimal here (copy and pasting onto a black background) most of the work is always done via Lightroom. Its such a powerful piece of software, and so much easier to use than photoshop haha!