I went to the observatory so I knew exactly where the moon would be in the sky. First, two result photos. As always, click to embiggen.
Both photos are full-frame, uncropped. The only Photoshop work was to use levels to darken the midtones a bit and curves to darken the contrast a little. No sharpening. And, of course, convert to JPEG which does all sorts of little twitchy things by itself. Maybe I should have converted them to PNGs.
There is a visible size difference of the moon between the two images. The first is taken with my Canon Eos SL1 with a 75-300 image stabilized zoom at 300mm. it's an 18 megapixel camera. With the SL1's APS-C sensor, it multiplies the focal length by 1.6, turning the 300mm into an effective 480mm. The second image is taken with my Lumix ZS-70 at an effective optical lens focal length of 780mm, no digital zoom.
There's a few problems. First, the autofocus of the Lumix in conditions like this is is terrible compared to the Canon's. And the manual focus in low light absolutely SUUUUUCKS. That being said, it did OK. The Lumix was set on a tripod, and that's a problem because the moon is always moving and there's no way I'm going to be able to track it on a tripod - it's just not possible. If I had a telescope with motorized tracking, that would be different. But I don't. I'm tempted to set up one camera on a tripod in the dome of the 3.5 meter, and I might, I'm undecided on that.
And that introduces a second problem - exposure. As I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the Lumix was on a tripod. The Canon - handheld. The moon - and this is a supermoon and is thus closer and brighter - is surprisingly bright. Believe it or not, these shots were taken at an ISO of 400 with a 1/2000th of a second shutter speed! I can hand-hold most exposures, but when the moon is in or near totality, it will be a problem as the moon will be darker and will require more exposure, I'll probably have to revert to the tripod.
Problem 2A - The height of the moon over the horizon. The moon is going to be awfully bloody high! My tripod cannot directly tilt that high. I have to employ two tricks to make it work so, tricks that I do not recommend to the casual photographer - I've been doing this for decades and I'm uncomfortable doing it myself! I have a right-angle eyepiece adapter that works with my 6D, I'm not certain it has adapters that'll work with my SL1.
Problem 2B - Can I find an exposure mode that'll work with a camera that I set up on the telescope level that will adapt when the moon enters/exits totality? Look at those two images. The moon occupies very little of the frame. Any auto-exposure mode won't cope well under those conditions, but will it if I dial in 3 or 4 f-stops of under-exposure? I'm not sure, I should have tested it tonight.
Problem 3 - It's going to be awfully effing cold! Doing these test shots, I couldn't wear gloves and operate the controls on the Lumix. The buttons are small, and the tripod was tilted waaay back to point upwards. Even with the LCD touchscreen tilted back, I had to take my gloves off to try to use it, which was an exercise in futility.
I might be able to wear a medium thickness glove on my left hand and a light glove on my right with the SL1. But the temperature was just below freezing, and when I went into the control room, the wind was giving me an effective wind chill of 17-20f. My clothing was good enough, but my hands were freezing!
Now, this
is my first rodeo - I've never photographed a lunar eclipse before. I knew that I didn't really have the right equipment for it: I need a much longer telephoto. Sigma now has a 60-600 zoom: that would fit my needs, and assuming it's good - and Sigma does make good glass - I could see investing $2,000 in something like that - eventually. But I also need a telescope with tracking. That's several hundred dollars. And I need to rig up an external power supply for whichever camera I'm going to use, which is a hundred or so for an external battery grip, then modifying it so that I can run a cable to external rechargeable batteries. And I might have to create a heating system: most cameras don't like to operate in below freezing temperatures, I know the display in my Lumix goes nuts when the air temperature gets into the 20s.
I will get photos of the eclipse. I won't get an awesome photo series, but it will be a learning experience. Hopefully I won't get frostbite or pneumonia. ;-) And eventually I'll get a paying job, get some money saved up and some equipment purchased. The good thing is that I've been planning to get the battery grips and external batteries to pursue my
star streak photography experiments, which illness prevented me from doing anything with last summer.
That's the nice thing about camera equipment: yes, some of the pieces are expensive, but it's rare that after getting it that you only use it for one thing. It's a pretty solid long-term investment, and the lenses last a long time and can be used (usually!) with future generations of the same family of camera bodies.
(Except there's this one thing that I REALLY want to do. It's slightly silly, and it would cost about $300, and I don't know if it'd be worth it, but I REALLY want to do it! You see, digital cameras are VERY sensitive to infrared. So sensitive, in fact, that they have a high-pass filter to block the IR and pass the higher, optical frequencies that we see to the imaging chip. I gave my dad my first DSLR, an original Canon Digital Rebel, 6 megapixels, that's kind of worthless as it's grossly superseded in performance, and he isn't using it, so I'm planning on taking it back. There's this camera shop that, for about $300, they'll take the camera apart, remove the high-pass filter, and re-focus and put it back together, making it a strictly IR camera. The results are very interesting! Here's two communities on LJ devoted to it, the former mostly Russian and fairly active, the latter hasn't had a post since 2013.)![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
