photographing the lunar eclipse - 3rd March ?

the moon moves surprisingly fast, you need to keep the shutter speed up which is why I suggested 400ISO film.

Unfortunately I was otherwise engaged last night and missed it, but my Dad got this




*istDL2 on an 8" F5 newtonian, motor driven to match siderial motion

ISO 200, 10 seconds

Yes, I'm kicking myself now - a minute spent doing some simple arithmetic beforehand would have made a big difference.

I was using a 400mm lens with x2 TC, that's 800mm, with an angle of view corresponding to 1200mm on a 35mm negative.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angle_of_view, it appears that the angle of view is 1.72 degrees.

At 360/24 = 15 degrees an hour, or 0.25 degrees per minute as someone said, in 3 seconds that's about 0.73% of my frame width.

Blown up on the screen to 24cm, that's a horizontal blur of nearly 2mm, which is obvious even with a ruler.

I should have increased the ISO to 1600 and put up with the noise - it would have been quite a bit better I suspect.

Just given all mine another look over, the problem is definately movement of the moon, unless there's elongated stars up there

On another note, I did get a nice sunset on the way home from the east coast

I like it impotentspider very doomsday like

Chris,

I shot 175 images and didn't get anything as stunning as I wished for! During totality I shot at various ISO settings upto 1600 and still had motion blur and condensation on the lens, which with the low illuminatiuon made accurate focussing difficult. My best effort is here:- http://www.ephotozine.com/gallery/showlargepic.cfm?photoid=835210

Nice. I realised early that focusing during totality would be impossible, so I fiddled about quite a bit until there was about 1/3 of the moon not yet in the umbra, and then left it severely alone.

I was very, very careful not to disturb the focus when I took the TC off during totality... in the desperate (and in vain) search for sharpness

Just trying to show my first picture on the Web. I did manage to capture a few images of the eclipsed moon. I'm having a bit of computer trouble with RAW images, so this was the last one I took, but enhanced slightly from the jpeg. It looks pretty blurred, although I took all the precautions I could think of, including use a tripod; No Anti-Shake; mirror lock up and remote release. I'd previously read that a good rule of thumb is to use a shutter speed of 600/Focal length of lens. As I was using a 500mm lens, this gave 0.8s. This was shot at 0.7s. I'll have a closer look at the previous shot at 0.5s, but this was only marginally off having total dark bits even at 1600ASA.