Daniel Binkard: September 2015

27 September 2015

Lunar Eclipse, September 27, 2015

Lunar eclipse near Box Butte Reservoir, September 2015. (Photo by Daniel Binkard)

The 2015 lunar eclipse seemed like a good opportunity to stress test the newest camera I owned at the time, which was six years old. As everyone knows, once a camera becomes more than a year old, it becomes incapable of taking good pitchers, and should be replaced by whatever is on sale at Walmart.
Astrophotography with minimal motion blur is an excellent stress test for a camera, because you're dealing with high ISOs to maintain a high enough shutter speed to keep the point-light stars from turning into arcs of light. It's also a good lens test, because coma is a factor in keeping clean points of light. Then I added an extra dose of dynamic range with a (partially) sunlit moon face.
All that technical junk aside, let's look at the three photos I kept as a sort of triptych of the eclipse.
The first is an early partial eclipse, with the earth's shadow just starting to slide across the lunar disc (These terms sound great. Umbra is another fun word.). The wispy clouds in front of the moon add a bit of depth. I always like seeing the moon through clouds.
Stage two shows the sharp shadow about halfway across the moon. While shooting, I ran through a bracketed set of exposures, intending to do an HDR merge and keep the sunlit portion from blowing out. Never did get things lined up and merged properly, whether through automatic means or old-fashioned Photoshop tricks. Better astrophotographers have undoubtedly made this sort of shot work. In the end, I decided to keep the overexposed portion. And the subtle rays coming off that area are fun. The clouds had changed by this time, with some puffy wisps getting lit up by the moon.
Stage three shows the moon fully ensconced (a made up word for sure) in velvety cloud and scattered red light from the earth's atmosphere. This is the ISO 3200 test on a 2009 camera, and the noise is definitely there. Working with the shadowy detail in the clouds is where things fall apart, and I'd like to try this kind of shot again with a modern camera. But I'm pleased with the results of this collection. It was a good night to be out under the stars, in the middle of nowhere, with the coyotes in the distance.