December 21 2010 Lunar Eclipse Naples FL

The weather in Naples, FL on December 21, 2010 was clear enough to allow me to get some lunar eclipse photos. I found the NYIP eclipse page very helpful for timing and exposure guidance.
I used a Canon 50D, EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS and an EF 2x ii.
Exposing for 2 seconds or more was enough to for the moon's movement to blur the photo. With the EF-2x on, apertures wider than F/8 didn't seem sharp enough. ISOs above 800 seemed to lose too much detail to noise. I only used IS while focusing in live view. And a cable release and mirror lock up seemed to help.

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Seattle Space Needle and Full Moon April 2010

Thanks to TPE and google maps for an approximate location, EXIF data on Flickr for an exposure estimate, and DOFMaster for hyperfocal distance calculations for aperture, I was able to work out all the details for this two weeks before it happened. The weather forecast was so bad that night that I almost gave up. When I looked at the sky a few hours before this shot, I figured it might happen so I drove out there. 
Yes this is one real photo (tweaked pretty hard in Lightroom though). 

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Lunar Eclipse from Issaquah, WA

I can't believe the weather cooperated!
Just before I went to bed I put all my gear on the porch to cool off so my lenses didn't fog when I was ready to get started, and left a pile of warm clothes near the door. 3 hours later I was out of bed.
I crawled on the roof with two cameras on tripods and a bag of lenses and other equipment. In the dark! I'm sure it looked like a huge disaster waiting to happen.
I started by shooting intervals on the 30D & 24-70 as the moon faded away (I'll have to photoshop them all into one picture eventually). And I used the 10D IR with the 70-300 and a 1.5x TC. Having to manually focus that thing just wasn't working for me. And the moon looks the same in IR anyway.
As I sat there and enjoyed the show I realized the moon was getting so dark that I could probably pull of some star trails with the moon in the frame. So once it was fully eclipsed I started the lens changing madness. I never did do any serious star trails because I remembered that my camera will take a noise reducing exposure of equal length immediately following the shot. I didn't want to take a 10 minute star trail and lose the camera for 20 minutes total. So I got some nice shots of the orange moon and stars. And now I'm going to bed...

Click here to see the rest of my lunar eclipse photos.

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