Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night...

...Or a good eclipse anyway.

I actually managed to stay up for the historic winter solstice lunar eclipse early tuesday morning even though it didn't start until 1 a.m.(-ish) here on the east coast of the U.S. and didn't reach totality until 3 a.m.(-ish). Too often these sorts of things seem to coincide with cloudy weather in my area, but for once the night was crystal clear, though a bit nippy being in the 20s and with more breeze than I would have liked.

I've tried taking pictures of the moon before and never been able to find any sort of proper settings to get decent pics. Even so, I tried my best to see what I could capture of this rare event. The resulting shots are not great, but not as bad as I'd feared either, so I thought I would share them for laughs and/or snickers. Some things to bear in mind, however, in my defense in this particular case:

• My general lack of experience with nighttime celestial photography... There's always trial-and-error random experimenting with various camera settings when shooting in non-typical conditions and I always have a hard time remembering any particular ones which seem to come close to being even halfway satisfactory.
• My camera is over a decade old now, so hardly state of the art, with a max optical zoom of 3x which just isn't quite good enough for this sort of thing.
• The aforementioned cold, making it difficult to navigate camera menu settings via tiny buttons when trying to experiment with different combinations.

On the plus side, though, I do have a good tripod mount and that's definitely a must in my opinion for nighttime photography to have any chance of turning out decent.

There was a lot of trying this, that, and other settings, then going inside to warm up and transfer the pics to my PC to examine in better detail just to see if I was getting anything at all indicating continued efforts might be justified. At least an eclipse is not a whiz bang affair and the leisurely pace affords some time to walk away and back without really missing anything of consequence.

Even late tuesday night (the eclipse having been early tuesday morning) it was still a clear sky and still essentially a full moon, so I broke out my camera's manual, read a bit, and then tried some more experiments with settings which I hadn't ever delved into before. I tried adjusting contrast and using a "shutter speed priority" mode. I had hoped that either one might significantly tone down the brightness of the full moon in the dark night. But no such luck. Every shot always came out looking more like it was the sun hanging up there in the black sky, not the moon. Oh well. I think I've convinced myself that my camera just isn't good enough for such shots. And that's OK.

On the plus side, though, taking pics of an eclipse actually helped the shots come out better because then the moon isn't so overwhelmingly bright in an otherwise black sky. Still not good, mind you, but better.

As the eclipse progressed, I discovered that if I changed the camera setting from my usual SQ 1024x768 size to HQ 2048x1536 it helped. That way, the moon essentially shows up twice as big by default since I can always crop the picture dimensions down without shrinking the moon image itself. Shots below where the moon looks larger are the result of the HQ setting rather than SQ. I seem to have gone back and forth a little between SQ & HQ, not fully realizing the advantage of the HQ setting until everything was done. Oh well.

Anway, without further technical prattling here are my 9 best shots (believe it or not) of the eclipse...

       

       

       



Now that you've had a few laughs looking at those pathetic images, here's a link to the accomplished results of some real photographers using proper equipment...

Lunar Eclipse Images From Around the World, Dec. 21, 2010
Presented by Nancy Atkinson at Universe Today

The ones showing the fully eclipsed reddish moon (from Queens, NY; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Aberdeen, UK; Fair Lawn, NJ; and Lancaster County, PA) are most like what I actually saw in my little corner of the world. The view was spectacular to the naked and binoculared eye!

All in all the eclipse was a fine, even truly awesome, early Christmas present in my opinion, a wondrous sight to behold. Merry Christmas to you, dear reader (assuming the phrase is applicable for you, but I assure you absolutely no offense is intended if it is not). May the holiday season find you at some point joyful and content, among those you love, feeling loved yourself, and most especially of all, fully aware and mindful of sensing/experiencing it.