Time in the shade
This image is composed of six different photos I took of the December 21, 2010 lunar eclipse and stitched together in Photoshop. The progression is the first half of the eclipse, before the moon went into full obscurity behind Earth’s shadow. The shots, which span about an hour, are arranged in chronological order, starting from the 12:00 position and progressing clockwise.
I think this mosaic is cool, and am looking to make a clock out of it, but still, I was hoping for much more color and clarity from these photos. There’s a somber rush that I get from shooting the night sky and I couldn’t wait to capture the vibrant colors of this unique event.
Unfortunately, there were a few things working against me. Some could’ve been avoided, others not so much:
- Heavy cloud cover over Phoenix skies (bleh)
- Equipment: 50mm/f1.8 lens; 18-55/f5.6 lens; tripod (not much zoom there)
- Location: my patio, surrounded by street, holiday, housing and city lights (not ideal for night shots)
For these photos, I set the camera on a tripod extended to it’s highest point. I played around with the aperture mostly and found that the larger stops created too-bright and too-blurry images, so I opted for the smaller stops. Most of the photos in this image I used about an f22 stop and kept the shutter speed set to about 1/4″ – 4″ to compensate.
This is my lunar eclipse photo. There are many more photos like it. But this one is mine.