What a long gap between posts! I’ve been busy with a magazine article and a book chapter. I’d grown out of being busy, I found. Anyway, this morning’s eclipse is a good way to get back into blogging. Here in NZ we are experiencing problems with dust from the Chilean volcano affects the quality of my photos. The timing of the eclipse meant that we could only see the first half of the action from New Zealand. But we were lucky with the weather, a crisp, clear morning. I’ll just let the images speak for themselves.
Time: 0635
Time: 0640
Time: 0645
Time: 0655
Time: 0702
Time: 0715
Time: 0730
That last one required an increase in exposure – the moon was getting noticeably darker by then. For photographers that haven’t tried moon shots before: the surface of the moon normally is getting much the same sunlight that we get here on earth. Because of the surrounding blackness, an ‘auto’ setting on the camera gets it horribly wrong, over-exposing the moon so all detail is lost. A good approach is to set the camera on manual and use typical settings for a sunny day. I used 1/100 at f8 for nearly all of these.
To get any detail when the eclipse was almost complete I had to open up by about 7 stops (2 secs at f5.6) for this next shot, taken just a couple of minutes later:
Dawn was approaching at this point, so just before the moon disappeared completely I took this next shot (from our front door):
