Practice for the weekend eclipse

southy1978

southy1978

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Darren
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I had a little practice this evening for the upcoming blood moon/lunar eclipse. I think possibly I need a slightly higher shutter speed and definitely need a tripod!!

Hopefully the clouds stay away for the weekend and I can stay awake!!
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Thank you. It was taken with a canon 7d, 100-400 @ 400mm, 1/80, F8.0, iso400. I did have image stabilisation turned on as I was handholding.
From reading a few guides I should be able to up the shutter speed a bit and remove a bit of the blur.
 
southy1978 said:
Thank you. It was taken with a canon 7d, 100-400 @ 400mm, 1/80, F8.0, iso400. I did have image stabilisation turned on as I was handholding.
From reading a few guides I should be able to up the shutter speed a bit and remove a bit of the blur.
Click to expand...

Not during the eclipse, you wont be able to up the shutter speed as much as you think, the moon will be nowhere near as bright as it is normally.
A tripod will be needed unless you are planning on upping the ISO considerably, which I doubt you want to do on a 7D ;)
 
Hi Darren,
your moonshot is overexposed on the rhs and I would suggest that you bracket the exposure to try and get the right balance between the terminator and the edge.
When it comes to the eclipse you will probably find focussing is more difficult to achieve (or at least I did) so this time I'm going to use manual focus to stop the lens hunting.
The light level from the normal moon is about 3% of sunlight so it's much brighter than you think but when eclipse happens the only illumination is via earthshine (diffracted sunlight) which is
quite dim.
I'll see if I can find my exposure settings for the last total eclipse which may provide some guidance for settings.
 
Hi Darren,
I've looked for my old photos of the last total lunar eclipse but I must have binned them as they were not worth keeping.
After some research, I found that the moon during full eclipse is 10 orders of magnitude dimmer. I'm guessing that's about 3 stops. Perhaps some photo pro would like to put me right if that's not correct?
 
mbscad said:
Hi Darren,
I've looked for my old photos of the last total lunar eclipse but I must have binned them as they were not worth keeping.
After some research, I found that the moon during full eclipse is 10 orders of magnitude dimmer. I'm guessing that's about 3 stops. Perhaps some photo pro would like to put me right if that's not correct?
Click to expand...

I think the correct answer is somewhere between your two guesses. One order of magnitude is x10, so 10 orders of magnitude is 10^10 or about 32 stops. But 3 stops is definitely too small.

The problem is that it's not really possible to predict the brightness at totality. It depends on things like the weather and recent volcanic eruptions. Also, the Moon will not be passing through the centre of the Earth's shadow during this eclipse, so the southern limb will be brighter than the northern limb.

About 8-10 stops should be in roughly the right area. One helpful fact is that 10 stops is a factor of 1000. If the full Moon needed an exposure of 1/2000s then the eclipsed Moon will need an exposure 1000 times longer, or 0.5s. This makes it easier to do sums in your head.

Luckily lunar eclipses are leisurely affairs, so there's plenty of time to take a shot then check the histogram and adjust the exposure if required.
 
hollis_f said:
I think the correct answer is somewhere between your two guesses. One order of magnitude is x10, so 10 orders of magnitude is 10^10 or about 32 stops. But 3 stops is definitely too small.
Click to expand...
Each stop doubles the light entering the sensor so 2 x 2 x 2 =8 times as much light - I stand by my guess. But we'll be able to confirm this tonight one way or the other assuming the pesky clouds stay away!
I'm amending this post since I've looked at some pictures and the EXIF data and it would appear that 12 stops in shutter speed were required between moon regular and full eclipse.
Apologies Frank.
 
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